The failed bombings of 21/7

Twenty years ago today four terrorists killed 52 people and injured more than 700 in suicide bomb attacks on London's public transport.

Two weeks after the horrors of 7/7, there were four more attempted attacks. This time the devices failed to detonate properly but once again London was "unnerved", said historian Dominic Sandbrook on the BBC, but the police investigation led to the tragic death of one innocent man.

What happened?

In an attempted repeat of the 7/7 attacks, four Islamist extremists targeted three London Underground trains and a bus, but their devices failed to explode and only the detonators of the bombs went off.

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These minor explosions caused nothing more than the popping sounds mentioned by witnesses, and the only reported injury was one person having a minor asthma attack.

Although no one died on 21/7, it was "nevertheless a terrible reminder" of the capital's "vulnerability to domestic terrorism" and the "apparently ubiquitous threat of Islamist extremism", said Sandbrook.

The offenders apparently "intended to kill themselves in acts of martyrdom", said The Jamestown Foundation, but they fled the scenes after their bombs failed to explode, sparking an "international manhunt", said Cosmopolitan.

The Metropolitan Police commissioner at the time, Sir Ian Blair, said the investigation became "the greatest operational challenge ever faced" by the force.

How were they caught?

The failure of the bombs to go off meant police were able to recover forensic material from the scenes, while CCTV images of the bombers were also widely shared.

With public transport passengers in the capital on edge, the investigation took a tragic turn when, the day after the failed attacks, police shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian electrician who was mistaken for one of the bombers.

Within eight days, police had arrested all four of the main suspects. One was apprehended in Birmingham, two were arrested in London and a fourth was caught in Rome and extradited to the UK.

At their trial, the judge described their plot as a "viable attempt at mass murder". Ramzi Mohammed, Muktar Said Ibrahim and Yassin Omar were found guilty of conspiracy to murder and sentenced to minimum terms of 40 years' imprisonment.

A fourth man, Ismail Abdurahman, was convicted of assisting one of the failed bombers and failing to disclose information about the planned attacks. He was sentenced to 10 years, reduced to eight on appeal.

What happened next?

In 2008, the men lost a court appeal to challenge their convictions. Judges rejected their claim that the devices were made to look realistic "but included flaws" that were meant to "ensure that the main charge of each of those devices would not detonate".

The judges also dismissed applications from two of the men to challenge their sentences, ruling that "as they were rightly meant to be", the sentences were "severe and extreme".

In 2014, they lost an appeal at the European Court of Human Rights. Three of the men had claimed their human rights had been breached because statements they made to police without lawyers present had been used as evidence, and a fourth man argued he had been treated unfairly when he was interviewed as a witness.

The court ruled that it had been "convincingly established" that at the time of the interviews there was an "exceptionally serious and imminent threat to public safety", which provided "compelling reasons" to "delay" all four applicants' access to lawyers.

The following year, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights agreed to look again at the case. It ruled that there was no violation of rights for Ibrahim, Ramzi Mohammed and Omar, but there was a violation in the access to legal counsel for Abdurahman.