Luton Station car park - recovering the truth

Every now and then J7: The July 7th Truth Campaign is contacted by ordinary people who have a need to tell their side of the 7/7 story. More often than not it is precisely these accounts and voices that are absent from the major media coverage, perhaps because their stories often contradict the official 'narrative' and inquest versions of events. We would all do well to bear in mind that, as is so often the case, the real stories of events like 7/7 are the stories of ordinary people, going about their ordinary daily business - the 99% - from the commuters and workers who were initially attacked, right through to the ordinary workers who set about finding, treating and rescuing the injured and those others who assisted with picking up the pieces; train drivers, station staff, paramedics, emergency services personnel, hospital workers; the list goes on.

The Vehicle Recovery Worker's Story

Recently, we were contacted by a vehicle recovery worker, Mr Derek Allison, who, after reading J7's coverage of the 7/7 inquest proceedings, felt moved to recount his version of events with regard to the Fiat Brava that was removed from Luton Station car park on 7^th July 2005.

Derek Allison worked for J & K Recovery as a recovery driver and received a call to attend Luton Station car park at 5.30pm on 7^th July. A lot of vehicle recovery work was undertaken on behalf of Bedfordshire Police and he was informed that the vehicle to be collected was a UIC (Used In Crime) vehicle, a red Fiat Brava, although no further details were provided.

Allison was surprised on his approach to Luton Station when he found that Station Road had been cordoned off and there were at least two police vans and several police officers present. Still more police officers were in the immediate vicinity of the Fiat Brava that Derek had been instructed to collect. He noticed that the Brava's passenger side front window was open about an inch. Under normal circumstances this would usually enable him to either push the window further down to gain access, or to use a lock-out kit to open the door and release the handbrake. However, the window wouldn't open and he didn't have his lock-out kit with him. He noted that there was a pay and display ticket on the car valid until 23.59 on 7^th July and a valid road tax disc displayed. Allison, however, didn't see any parking ticket attached to the windscreen and, generally speaking, any vehicles that had transgressed Luton Station car park regulations would end up being clamped, rather than towed.

Beause of the height restriction of the car park barrier, Derek's own recovery vehicle was unable to enter to collect the Brava directly. A second, smaller recovery vehicle was called for and the Brava was transferred onto Derek's vehicle outside the car park, and then driven to J & K Recovery's vehicle compound in Leighton Buzzard. Derek then used a forklift truck to lift the Brava and place it in the area of the compound reserved for cars picked up on behalf of the police.

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The car remained in the same position in the compound from the evening of 7^th July right the way through until 12^th July. Despite the car being identified as UIC, no representatives of Bedfordshire police attended to carry out forensics inspections on it.

At 8pm on Tuesday 12^th July, Derek received a phone call asking him to attend the vehicle compound in Leighton Buzzard. That day he had been watching news reports of controlled explosions on a Nissan Micra at Luton Station. When he arrived at the J & K Recovery compound he was greeted by officers from the bomb squad and SO13 and was asked to move the Fiat Brava into the covered garage for the forensics. This was done using a fork lift truck and he then used a lock-out kit to open the door for the forensics team to investigate the interior of the car. Allison was then present whilst items were removed from the Brava, and he recalls that these items included a pile of clothes, boxes, which may have been cool boxes, a gun, ammunition and a great deal of paperwork.

What concerned Derek is that his experience of the Fiat Brava aspect of the story directly contradicts sworn testimony given to the 7/7 Inquests, the self-styled 'final words' on the story of 7/7 as far as the State is concerned.

The 7/7 Inquest Version of the Fiat Brava Story

During the opening week of the 7/7 Inquests, Hugo Keith QC read from the statement of DC Andrew Donaldson describing events around the Fiat Brava:

Mr Williams had to force entry into the vehicle in order to conduct his procedures as the doors were locked and there were no keys present with the car. This entailed a front window being smashed.

Source: 14 October am page 51 line 6

Derek Allison knows this to be untrue. The front window of the Brava was not smashed and the explosives officer, Mr Williams, did not force entry to the car. On the contrary, Derek Allison was asked to use the lockout kit to open the door, which is precisely what he did. This information would have been available to the inquest teams as Allison gave a statement in May 2006 after being contacted by DS Richard de Cadenet [brother of Amanda de Cadenet] to give a statement. An interesting aside, particularly for anyone unfamiliar with the outstanding success of arrests related to the Operation Theseus investigation, and in a similar way to the investigating officers in the case of Imran Bham, Richard de Cadenet was himself later arrested and imprisoned for fraud.

J7 have been studiously submitting Freedom of Information requests since the inquests into the 52 ended to enable us to examine the many further anomalies that have arisen during these proceedings. One Freedom of Information request was sent to Bedfordshire Police asking why the Brava had been towed from Luton Station on 7^th July 2005. This had not been explained during testimony or cross examination.

During his testimony to the inquests DI Kindness stated that the removal of the Brava was captured on CCTV and that this CCTV would be shown during the inquest proceedings, but this never happened. Certainly the cordoning off of the entire station car park and the number of police officers present at Luton Station on the day absolutely requires some explanation. Given the official investigation timeline, it is hard to imagine quite what it was that had inspired the police to cordon off the entire car park and maintain such a heavy police presence for what nobody would have suspected to be any other than an ordinary Used in Crime car recovery situation.

The response to the J7 FOI request from Bedfordshire Police was refused and they instead replied with a link to a publicly available statement by Bedfordshire Police issued in February 2011, which states:

Weeks later, the tragic and terrible events of 7 July prompted an immediate national police response. In Bedfordshire that included using 'Automatic Number Plate Recognition' (ANPR) technology on the evening of July 7 to locate suspicious vehicles in the county's railway car parks. The Fiat Brava was found in the Luton railway car park because it was identified as a vehicle used in the previous aggravated burglary. It was immediately removed to a secure garage for subsequent forensic examination in relation to the May offence, and regarded as a break in the Luton investigation. Clearly, once the Met Police had examined the CCTV footage from the car park, it quickly became apparent that the Fiat Brava was also significant to the 7/7 Bombing investigation. The car was then handed over to the Met Police for further investigation.

An open vehicle compound can hardly be described as 'a secure garage' and no explanation is offered for why 'no subsequent forensics' on the Brava were carried out in connection to the burglary until the events of 12^th July. Did other police forces also carry out searches for 'suspicious vehicles in their railway car parks' on 7^th July and why was this considered necessary? What would a 'suspicious vehicle' look like? Derek is not aware of a higher than normal number of vehicles being removed that day and given that the Brava exhibited a pay and display ticket issued that morning would it not have made better policing sense to monitor the car to see who returned to it in the few hours that remained until the pay and display ticket expiry time of 11.59pm?  Why did the 7/7 Inquest hear that the Brava was entered by smashing a front window which Derek knows is a lie? And why, so far, has no official body had the temerity to explain quite what the pressing need was to cordon off all of Luton Station for a routine vehicle recovery in the early evening of 7^th July 2005?

7/7 Inquests: Fiat Brava Foxtrot Tango

We have already examined the fact that CCTV from Luton station car park was not being viewed on 12 July 2005, as stated in the sworn witness testimony of Metropolitan Police Detective Inspector Kindness. CCTV from Luton station car park was being viewed at least as early as 10 July. The 7/7 Inquest was then informed that Jermaine Lindsay's Fiat Brava, after being issued a parking ticket at 5.53 am on 7 July was towed away that same evening:

Q.[HUGO KEITH] Were you able to identify the cars that they used at the station?
A. [DI KINDNESS] Yes, we were.
Q. So you were able to identify that they had arrived in two cars, a Nissan Micra and a red Fiat Brava?
A. That's correct, sir.
Q. Were there any difficulties associated with the CCTV viewing in relation to the Luton car park?
A. The Luton car park, the cameras on the car park were on a high gantry. The quality wasn't great, and the -- the weather was quite inclement that morning, it was quite dark when they arrived, so we did have some initial difficulties. The sizes of the images were very, very small in the car park and unclear to make out exactly what was going on.
Q. When you viewed the CCTV for Luton car park, did you discover that one of the cars had then subsequently been towed away?
A. Yes, it had been.
Q. Which car was that?
A. That was the Brava, sir.
Q. Had it, in fact, been towed away on the evening of 7 July 2005?
A. Yes, we were able to view the CCTV and see that happening.
Q. In fact, did subsequent enquiries show that there had been a parking ticket in the Fiat Brava up to 23.59 on the evening of that Thursday?
A. That's correct, sir.
Q. But the other car, the Nissan Micra, was still there, and could you still see it in the continuing CCTV?
A. Yes, we could.
Q. As a result of you discovering the location of those cars, did officers then attend to look at, in particular, the Nissan Micra in the car park?
A. Yes, indeed.

Source: Transcripts 13 October 2010 am page 11 lines 12 on

Although the testimony of the parking attendant was read to the 7/7 Inquest [page 57 line 24 on] a copy was never released onto the evidence section of the Inquest website.

As J7 had noted in Mind The Gaps, the towing away of cars was not specified in the parking regulations at Luton station car park, instead wheel clamping and the payment of parking fines before exiting the car park were the method used:

Hugo Keith informed the Inquests on 12 October that CCTV showing the removal of the Fiat Brava on 7 July 2005 existed, but this footage wasn't shown amongst the various CCTV clips shown at the Inquest and has yet to be released into the public domain.

Q. It wasn't played yesterday, but is it right that there does exist uninterrupted footage showing that Brava from its arrival at 5.07 right through the morning?
A. That's correct, sir, yes.
Q. Presumably, that has been viewed to see if there were any people coming and going from the Brava?
A. Yes, well, when viewing of the Brava resulted in its eventual identification on the -- you know, its removal later on in the day.
Q. So we do see the person who appears to be Jermaine Lindsay coming and going from that car and I think we've discovered today that we also see the person who is believed to be the parking attendant --
A. That's correct, sir.
Q. -- who issued the ticket. Can we take it, therefore, that there were no other people coming and going from that car?
A. From my understanding, absolutely not. There was only Jermaine Lindsay.

Source: Transcripts 14 October 2010, Afternoon - page 50 line 9 on

The registration number for a Fiat Brava apparently registered to Lindsay was entered into the Police National Computer after a suspected robbery on 27 May 2005 although, once again, Lindsay was apparently never apprehended despite the car being registered in his name to his home address:

[HUGO KEITH] On 27 May, just five weeks before, Luton police received a call from a man to the effect that there was a gunman in his flat. When armed police arrived, neither the owner of the flat, presumably the person who called, nor the gunman were there. All had fled. Then a member of the public called in to say he had seen three males, two black and one Asian, wearing balaclavas and running down the road and he saw one of them holding a handgun. They got into a car and he managed to the a [sic] note of the car registration number, and it was a Fiat, R662 DSF. Lindsay's car. The police marked on the police national computer an interest in the car and requested that it be stopped if it was sighted. They then also went to the address of the registered keeper, Lindsay's address in Aylesbury that we've seen on the map, but there was no reply. A crime report was filed and an investigation commenced. They did a silent drive-by past the address again that night, but the car wasn't seen and was not subsequently traced. They drove past again the following day, but the investigation went nowhere, I think primarily because the victim of the armed robbery, or whatever it had been, could neither be identified nor traced, and the red Fiat Brava was not seen again until it was found in the Luton car park after 7 July 2005.

Source: 11 October 2010, pm, page 5 Line 13

For the purposes of brevity we shall ignore the rather fantastical sounding and seemingly unsolved "armed robbery, or whatever it had been" crime, in which it appears that the police have been unable to locate either the victim who "could neither be identified nor traced" or the apparent perpetrator(s), despite having the registration plate of the car in which the three apparent perpetrators made their getaway, and the address to which the car was registered. We shall also ignore that the police "did a silent drive-by past the address again that night" but didn't think to stop and make a second house call.

Seemingly, all the police did glean from this odd sounding incident, was the number of a car registered to Jermaine Lindsay and an address, 10 Northern Road, Aylesbury. It may be opportune to note that "The police marked on the police national computer an interest in the car and requested that it be stopped if it was sighted" and that Hugo Keith states quite clearly "the red Fiat Brava was not seen again until it was found in the Luton car park after 7 July 2005". However, the official 'narrative' version of events holds that the Brava was indeed used if not 'seen' again at least at Luton station car park, and at least on 28 June 2005, possibly alongside a Jaguar that also appeared in Luton station car park on both of these dates. The Police National Computer and the Automated Number Plate Recognition system, while very good at detecting and penalising the owners of uninsured vehicles, appears to be not so good at finding owners of cars involved in apparent real crimes.

A few seconds of CCTV claiming to be Lindsay's Brava being driven from Dunstable to Luton Station and in the car park on the morning of 28 June 2005 was shown at the Inquest on 13 October and released into evidence:

Lindsay's Fiat Brava in Dunstable from J7 Truth Campaign on Vimeo.

The precise date that Lindsay had moved to Aylesbury with his wife, Samantha Lewthwaite and their child is unclear, with media reports citing anything from three to seven weeks before 7 July 2005. The Inquests could produce evidence on when Lindsay purchased the Fiat Brava and the date that Lindsay and his family rented this property in Aylesbury, and if it was before he moved to Aylesbury, on what date he registered it in his new address.

The Fiat Brava is assessed to have contained everything from quantities of HMTD, a handgun and bullets to Tanweer's white jogging bottoms. The search of the Fiat Brava is said to have been carried out on 12 July 2005, although the reading out of the times from the following statement make it impossible to ascertain whether the times indicate activity that morning or in the evening:

[HUGO KEITH] Andrew Donaldson, a police officer. He provides a statement dated 20 October 2005. My Lady, this witness attends upon the motor car, the maroon-coloured Fiat Brava which you will recall was towed away from the railway station in Luton. He provides a very long witness statement detailing everything that was found in that car, and I propose just to make reference to one or two of the exhibits that were found.

Statement of ANDREW DONALDSON read
"I am the above-named detective constable. On Tuesday, 12 July, I was requested to go from London to Luton, Bedfordshire where two motor vehicles had been located at Luton railway station and which were suspected of being connected to the bomb attacks in London on 7 July.
"I arrived at Luton police station at 6.00 and liaised with other officers.
"At about 8.00 I travelled to a recovery compound arriving at about 8.30. I liaised with other officers already present, including an explosives officer, Dave Williams, who carried out safety search procedures on the car assigned to me to examine and search which was present here having been recovered from Luton railway station. Mr Williams had to force entry into the vehicle in order to conduct his procedures as the doors were locked and there were no keys present with the car. This entailed a front window being smashed.
"The car was a burgundy-coloured Fiat Brava. The safety search conducted by Mr Williams revealed no explosive devices present, but there was a handgun firearm located in the boot of the car together with a number of live rounds of ammunition which were with the gun but not in it. No other dangerous hazards were found in this initial safety check procedure. The firearm and ammunition was made safe by an authorised firearms officer. The motor car was then photographed by a Bedfordshire police photographer. It was then initially examined by a fingerprint officer whilst under cover inside a building.
"An initial search of the car was then conducted commencing at 9.15. I, as the scene examiner and exhibits officer, commenced and maintained contemporaneously an exhibit search logbook. The search was conducted with other anti-terrorist branch officers.
I list below all the items found and seized during the course of this search."

This fits with the narrative of viewing the CCTV on 12 July 2005, but not if the cars were identified in Luton station car park when the CCTV was viewed as early as 10 July 2005.

Mr Donaldson enters the Brava by smashing the front window, whereas the Nissan Micra is entered via a controlled explosion.

Whatever the correct dates of identifying the accused on CCTV the actual raid on 10 Northern Road, Aylesbury did not occur until around 7.00pm on Wednesday 13 July, a full 36 hours after the Leeds homes were raided.

One of the four Leeds addresses raided in the early hours of 12 July was the family home of Ejaz Fiaz, the man initially named as the suspect for the Piccadilly Line explosion. It is reported that Ejaz had in fact moved to Luton. His brother, Naveed Fiaz, was the only person to be arrested under the Terrorism Act but he was released without charge on 22 July, and no further details about his arrest were provided by the police.

According to this Guardian report, 10 Northern Road was under surveillance for at least 24 hours before the raid on 13 July with neighbours commenting that the family had moved in three weeks earlier. The report also includes an apparent sighting of Jermaine Linsday on Friday 8 July 2005, the day after he is alleged to have committed suicide on the Piccadilly Line between King's Cross and Russell Square:

Aylesbury house is searched in effort to find associates
The Guardian, Thursday 14 July 2005 03.36 BST

The search for potential associates of the London bombers turned last night to Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, where police raided a house.

More than 50 officers - many armed - sealed off Northern Road at around 7pm before entering the house.

No arrests were made but Scotland Yard confirmed that the raid, which was conducted jointly with Thames Valley police, was connected to last week's bombings in London.

Aylesbury is about 20 miles from Luton, Bedfordshire, where a vehicle thought to be linked to the attacks was towed away yesterday.

The raid focused on a house at the far end of Northern Road.

A resident of the street said a man in his 20s had moved in to the cottage three weeks ago, and that the house had been under surveillance for almost 24 hours before last night's raid.

"I knew something was going on earlier because I noticed a suspicious-looking van parked in the road and reported its number to the police," said Daphne Sibley, the road's Neighbourhood Watch coordinator. "They told me that it was a plain clothes surveillance officer."

Another resident, Paul Chilton, saw the police arriving as he left home to take his daughters off to a school disco.

"I noticed a Land-Rover which looked like an armed response vehicle and I thought that was a bit strange," said Mr Chilton, 40. "I dropped the girls off and set out for a Neighbourhood Watch meeting when, lo and behold, I saw about 30 or 40 police.

"Some were in plain clothes and some were in uniform and had guns, shields, and bulletproof vests. They were around number 10. I don't know the people who live there, but I don't think they were there when the police came."
----------------
It also emerged that the occupant of the house was last seen by neighbours on Friday - the day after the bombings - loading items into the boot of his red car, which was parked in Northern Road.

The naming of Jermaine Lindsay as a suspect was first made public on Wednesday 13 July by Nicolas Sarkozy, the then French Foreign Secretary, after an EU meeting. Lindsay was further named as 'Lindsey Germaine' by unnamed "American law enforcement officials" on Wednesday 15 July 2005:

On Wednesday, several American law enforcement officials identified one of the suspected suicide bombers as a Jamaican-born British resident named Lindsey Germaine.

Source: New York Times

The story of Jermaine Lindsay and the Fiat Brava makes even less sense if an article from Lindsay's local paper, The Bucks Herald, is accurate:

AYLESBURY WAS '30 MINUTES FROM EVACUATION'
Published on Tue Oct 25 13:49:38 BST 2005

(TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25) Aylesbury was just 30 minutes away from a full evacuation following the July 7 bombings when anti-terrorism police first connected the town to the terror attacks in London, The Bucks Herald can reveal.

New details emerged last week about the immediate threat police believed Jermaine Lindsay posed to the public after the suicide bombings on London's transport network rocked the capital.

A day after the attacks Chief Superintendent Simon Chesterman, the most senior police officer in Bucks, arrived at his office at Aylesbury Police Station to be confronted by Scotland Yard's counter terrorism unit.

Detectives believed that Lindsay, the Kings Cross bomber who killed 26 people, was, in fact, a fifth bomber, was still alive and posed an immediate threat to public safety.

Officers had discovered the car of Germaine Lindsay, who lived in Northern Road, abandoned at Luton train station, where he travelled to London with three other bombers.

What followed, said Chief Supt Chesterman, was the biggest police operation he had ever witnessed in 22 years on the force.

He said: "On July 8 I arrived in my office to be confronted by a team from the anti-terrorist squad."

Source: The Bucks Herald 25 October 2005

The questions are piling up for the 7/7 Inquests to answer in relation to the four accused and the events in London on 7 July 2005. To the ever growing list of hitherto unanswered questions we can now add:

• Was Lindsay suspected of being a fifth bomber and being sought in Aylesbury on 8 July 2005?
• When and why was the Fiat Brava towed from Luton Station car park?