The roof neatly lifted off, when the No. 30 bus blew up in Tavistock Square, that morning. A bit too neatly.
It had been cut.
We can see the cut-line along the base of the upper roof support:
This was discovered by the American Simon Shack, in October 2010 –
it seems that no-one noticed it earlier. Two of his images are here used, with kind permission.
Compare this image (which you may want to view here, in high-resolution) with a newly-released image of the whole, exploded bus that was shown at the Inquest (see below). Why was this image not released earlier? Maybe because it shows too well the dead-level top surface after the blast, which would have given the game away. Surely, that line was pre-cut, to make sure that the roof easily lifted off.
A scientific approach to the problem should involve taking a bus and blowing it up with a bomb at the back of the top deck, and seeing if the top lifts off. Would it? I doubt it very much, certainly not in the neatly-cut fashion we see here.
The pressure was enough to cause bleeding noses on the top deck, but not enough to make anyone deaf by their eardrums being destroyed (or, please post a comment if I’m wrong here). At such a pressure, I suggest that beforehand the whole top of the bus had to be nearly cut off, and ready to lift.
We notice how at the top of the corner-strut in the picture, the top of the bus came off leaving an irregular shaped tear, in contrast with the level saw-mark at the bottom,
Moving down a bit from that saw-mark, one sees the serial number of the bus, 17758 (on the date, 7/7/05). Well, fancy that.
The bus displays the well-known advert for the horror-movie ‘The Descent,’ which opened on July 8th (!). The film’s promoters (Wikipedia tells us) had to quickly alter the adverts, because: ‘ “people were still trapped underground in reality, so no one really wanted to go see a film about people trapped underground…” Yes, indeed, it was ‘Outright terror, bold and brilliant,‘ just as the advert stated.
Hasib Hussein wasn’t on that bus.
No Muslim terrorist blew it up.
Whoever blew it up, first sawed the edge of the top deck. We recall the (anonymous) testimony from someone claiming to work for the bus company ‘Stagecoach’ of people tinkering with the bus during the previous weekend:
Last saturday a contractor came to inspect the CCTV on the buses at the depot, according to my supervisor the person spent more than 20 hours over that weekend, 20 hours to see if the CCTV is working? Also that person who came was not a regular contractor, for security reasons the same few people always come to the depot to carry out work, this time it was different … Was the mammoth 20 hour inspection session of the CCTV a means of disabling the CCTV, or something even darker? Were the contractors, who were not familiar to the bus company employees, actually placing the bomb?
The saw-mark would also have been visible on the lifted-off bit of roof, which crashed onto the road in front of the bus. For comparison here is also a picture of the same bus type, so you can see where it was sawn-off prior to the 7/7 explosion. It’s tragic that that roof-top was just destroyed, and not kept for the Inquest, so that everyone could have seen the saw-marks.
An Engineer’s Opinion
I have an old friend who used to work for British Aerospace as an engineer. I showed him the above photos, and he commented as follows.
Of the side-on image showing the dead level tear-line along the top of the bus: several uprights from between the windows should have remained there, bent outwards from the explosion but still attached. The struts he reckoned were made of aluminium rather than steel. It would be hard to ask the bus-manufacturing company for comments because it was probably in Italy or somewhere (‘Margaret Thatcher scrapped UK vehicle manufacturing’, trains & buses are all made abroad).
Of the horizontal cut in the strut shown, he said its top and bottom surfaces followed a parallel fracture-line indicating it had been made by a cut not an explosion. Also it was not twisted or stretched, which further indicated a cut by a saw. It would have bulged outwards had it been torn by the explosion, and would not have the matching edges top & bottom.
It had been made by a heavy power-saw not a hand saw, of the kind which the police use quite a lot eg to rescue people trapped in crashed vehichles.
An independent body of engineers should have been called to assess it, especially the blown-off top section. Sections should have been examined, especially for an accident with a ‘public service vehicle.’ After a crash, industries spend thousands on recovering the parts (eg dredging a plane out of the ocean) and reassembling them in a massive hangar, to check where the fractures occurred. He found it highly suspicious that the police should throw away such crucial evidence without having engineers examine it. Accident engineers are normally the first people allowed on such a crash scene. He estimated a pressure of 25 psi for the roof to lift off, compared with 14 psi normal atmospheric pressure.
The bar curled around the strut looked like a chromium-plated passenger-safety bar. Then, while the two of us were walking along the Euston Road, he pointed out that buses, only some buses, had just such a bar down the left-hand front corner! Oddly enough I had never noticed this before. It was probably for safety so that staff could get up on the roof for cleaning, he surmised. We agreed that the bottom of those chrome ‘handles’ were above where the saw-mark had been made.
Admittedly, that did not quite explain the snake-like shape of the bar in Tavistock Square, but it was a good start…
Taken to Fort Halstead
The remains of that 30 bus were taken to the British Army’s research establishment at Fort Halstead, Sevenoaks. The Forensic Explosives Laboratory at fort Halstead aims, ‘to identify enemies’ explosives, and to find the means to counter them.’
It’s a large military site, over a square mile, and maybe the bus is still there.
My source came up to me after I’d given a talk to the Kent Freedom Movement, at Gravesend on 14th April, 2011. A pal with him who worked for the same delivery company vouched for him. He seemed quite genuine.
Fort Halstead at Sevenoaks (Crow Lane, Badger’s Mount) has long been headquarters of the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment, it’s where bombs are made. It does forensic analysis into explosives and supposedly analysed the bomb material for both the 7/7 and 21/7 explosions. It employs over 1000 personell. Especially Clifford Todd, who is principal forensic investigator at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Fort Halstead, advised the Inquest about explosives: he earlier seeded the absurd ‘black pepper and peroxide’ bomb story at the 2008 ‘July 7th’ trial at Kingston.
My source he had visited the site a dozen or so times. He had to show two IDs to gain entrance, his passport and driving licence. An escort about 60 years old ushered him in, for his delivery, and there assured him that the 30 bus from Tavistock Square had been brought here, sometime after July 7th. He added, ‘they make bombs here.’ My source could see bombs being driven past him, on crates and palettes. All the people there seemed to be either army types, in uniform, or police. He talked to a roofer, who was doing some work on underground bunkers there, where one could only see the roofs of the buildings.