LONDON, May 6: The 52 victims of the July 7, 2005 London bombings were unlawfully killed, a coroner ruled on Friday following exhaustive inquests into the Al Qaeda-inspired atrocity.

The verdicts were expected but the families of the victims were listening closely to what the coroner, judge Heather Hallett, has to say about whether the security services could have prevented the attacks and what more the emergency services could have done to improve their response.

The outcome is all the more poignant following the death of Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.The attacks on three London Underground trains and a bus killed 52 commuters and were perpetrated by four Islamist suicide bombers, two of whom had made video statements spliced with footage of Al Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Hallett was giving her verdicts and recommendations at the Royal Courts of Justice in London following nearly five months of hearings which examined the attacks in detail, shedding new light on the worst terror atrocity on British soil.

Over 73 days in court, some 309 witnesses gave evidence and a further 197 statements were read. The hearings generated 34,000 documents.

In her early remarks, Hallett said that although around a third of the victims were still alive in the minutes after the blasts, each of the 52 innocent victims would have died “whatever time the emergency services reached and rescued them”. The inquests had caused organisations to reassess their own systems and acknowledge that despite improvements already made, more may be possible, she said.

Chilling footage of the devastation was also shown in public for the first time — slow-moving, silent video from inside the devastated trains, revealing the bloody, scorched wreckage. Recordings of a flurry of phone calls to the emergency services were played, gradually revealing the destruction.

New details emerged about the bombers — ringleader Mohammed Siddique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Hasib Hussain and Germaine Lindsay. They were all British, the first three being of Pakistani origin.—AFP