16 years ago Islamic terrorists carried out one of the worst Jihad atrocities ever to afflict Britain. 54 innocent commuters on tube trains and a bus were brutally murdered by a team of suicide bombers.

The group of followers of a belief system and an ideology that was founded by a murderer and which expanded and survived via murder, randomly killed people for no other reason than that they were not part of their cult, they were ‘othered’ by the killers whose deaths were seen by them as what their deity wanted. The Islamic terrorists who carried out the 7/7 attack didn’t see their victims as human, maybe if they had then they would not have carried out the attack or recoiled in disgust at what their ideology demanded of them.

I remember that day as I was working in central London at the time and recall vividly how an initial report that there was an electrical fire on the Underground slowly morphed into a realisation that London had been hit by a mass casualty Islamic terror attack. People rushed to phones to check on loved ones and to find out what had happened. Because the mobile phone system had crashed through the sheer number of people trying to use it, people started to use the office phones but because they were often trying to call mobile numbers on a system that had become overwhelmed many calls failed causing more concern and more fear for loved ones. Management walked around talking in hushed tones and we heard the words ‘evacuation’ being voiced at various times of the day. For my own part I was evacuated out on a requisitioned Thames cruiser and dropped off on a jetty in East London where I was able to get a bus back to Dagenham where I was living at the time with my ex.

As well as mourning those who died that day and sparking my anger and disgust at the ideology that created such heartless killers, I also realise that both me and my now wife had lucky escapes. My wife, who I had not properly met at the time, was off work with the flu and had she not been she would have been on the Piccadilly Line train that was bombed. I missed the atrocity at Aldgate because I was uncharacteristically much earlier to work than I would normally have been. If I’d been a half hour or twenty minutes later going through Aldgate then I would have been on the Circle Line train that was attacked. I still shudder at the thought of what might have been and even today, because of the crashing of the mobile phone system, I make sure that I have readily to hand an off network communications system.

Those who died on 7/7 died because of an ideology, an ideology that kills and kills again, an ideology soaked in blood since its inception. We should never forget those who died on 7/7 but we should also never fail to remember what ideology created such monstrous mass murderers who killed indiscriminately on London’s public transport system.