The unsuspecting de Menezes was tracked through the subway station, down an escalator, and onto the platform, where a train was about to depart. As he boarded, the police team moved. One wrestled de Menezes to the floor. Two others fired a total of seven bullets into his head and body. The details caused a growing public furor as it emerged Scotland Yard had lied in claims that de Menezes was “dressed like a suicide bomber.” He had worn lightweight clothes. Police Commissioner Blair found himself progressively challenged over his statements that attempted to justify the shooting. Within his own police force, he was increasingly subjected to criticism by senior officers, who began to leak details to the media about unhappiness within the ranks over Blair’s leadership. The criticism deepened when the early stages of the investigation into de Menezes’s death showed a failure in communication between the team tracking de Menezes and their controllers at Scotland Yard. It transpired that one of the team had taken an unauthorised toilet break during a key part of the surveillance, and radio links between the team and Scotland Yard had temporarily broken down at a crucial stage. Later came the embarrassing news that Blair had authorized a small payment to be offered to the de Menezes family to help them with funeral expenses. The family rejected the offer.
Meantime, the death of the young electrician continued to fuel a huge outcry in Britain’s media. Human rights organizations had seized upon the shooting to mount a campaign against police methods and demand a reassessment of its shoot-to-kill policy. In March 2006, Blair found himself mired in a new controversy. He admitted that he had secretly bugged his conversation with Britain’s attorney general, Lord Goldsmith. They had been discussing telephone surveillance and the bugging of suspects at the time. The revelation brought new demands he should resign, the fifth call to do so since the death of de Menezes. He had brushed all those aside. But over the shooting he had one firm supporter. Nathan had told his MI5 liaison officer, “Those policemen thought they were acting in the best interests of everybody on the information they were given. Mistakes do happen.”
In Tel Aviv for Meir Dagan one death had to be weighed against the loss of life suicide bombers had already carried out, not only in London and Israel, but all around the world. The one certainty, he had told his staff, was the further away the last attack, the closer was the next one.
In the early hours of the first Saturday in October 2005, the duty officer on the Asia Desk in Mossad headquarters received a “Flash” e-mail from the
The forty-eight-year-old graduate engineer from Reading University in England had been personally recruited by Osama bin Laden to become the organization’s master bomber. As well as the previous Bali bombing, the Malaysian-born Azhari Husin had organized suicide bomb attacks on the American-owned Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in 2003 and the Australian Embassy in the city in 2004. Thirty people had died in the attacks and over a hundred were injured.
A few days before, Mossad had finally confirmed the MI5 claim that the mysterious “Mustafa” had been Husin, who had planned and recruited volunteers for the London bombings. Meir Dagan had told Eliza Manningham-Buller that Husin had traveled to London before the attacks, using one of the many passports known to be in his possession and traveling under one of his disguises. He may even have been in the capital when the attacks occurred: one of his trademarks was to observe the effects of the destruction for which he was responsible. He had been spotted at previous locations each time escaping in the confusion to return to one of his hideouts, which Mossad believed were in the Toba Kakar range of mountains separating Pakistan’s Northwest frontier from the equally inhospitable mountains of Afghanistan.
America’s National Security Agency geopositioned a satellite over an area that extended from Murgha and Khanozai, small towns in the foothills of the Toba Kakar range. Pakistani troops, supported by U.S. Special Forces and Britain’s SAS, began to prepare for another foray into the region. In the early hours of October 8, the entire region was devastated by an earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale. Millions of tons of rock and rubble buried the area. The Mossad analysts, who had been closely monitoring the area, decided that if Husin was buried beneath the debris it was unlikely his body would be found.
