BLOODY CARNAGE

The two-word headline was plastered across a photograph filling the entire front and back pages of the Sun.

The graphic picture showed a bewildered and blood-soaked female survivor being helped away from the dust and debris of the shattered St Stephen’s Entrance by an ashen-faced government minister. They were stepping over the twisted body of one of the victims. The minister’s eyes bulged in disbelief; his jacket hung in shreds; one end of the bloodied bandage wrapped around his head dangled down to his shoulder.

Eight further pages were devoted solely to what the newspaper was calling ‘the Parliament Bomb Outrage’.

There were photos of fallen masonry, shattered glass, buckled ironwork, the decapitated head of a stone statue, a single shiny black shoe. Heavily armed police officers were pictured manning hastily erected barriers, paramedics rushed towards ambulances with laden stretchers, an exhausted firefighter leaned against a wall with tears streaming down his face, white-suited scene-of-crime officers searched for forensic evidence amidst the chaos and confusion.

There were photos of survivors and photos of the dead. Bodies lying in the dust. Rows of zipped-up body bags.

In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, television and radio news bulletins had suggested the death toll could reach between a hundred and fifty and two hundred, but in the hours that followed, the number of confirmed dead was put at sixty-four. More were still listed as missing and many more were fighting for their lives in hospital.

The suicide bomber had been quickly identified: his student railcard was found five metres from the spot where the bomb had exploded. But the discovery of the railcard, far from explaining the outrage, just added to the mystery. For Zeenan Khan had been no international terrorist or ‘sleeper’ smuggled in from a terrorist hotbed like Afghanistan or the Middle East to await the order to strike from his masters.