The suicide bombings in London last July which left 56 people dead cost no more than a few hundred pounds to carry out, an investigation by the British Broadcasting Corporation World Service said on Tuesday.
That compares to the estimated $10 000 dollars that it cost to undertake the Madrid bombings in March 2004, which similarly targeted a European capital’s public transit system, killing more than 190 people.
”The cost of the attacks is decreasing exponentially,” Loretta Napoleoni, an economist and expert on terrorist financing, told the ”Dirty Money” programme on the BBC World Service.
She recalled that the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington in 2001 — involving teams of suicide airline hijackers — cost $500 000 to execute.
The July 7 attacks in the British capital targeted three underground subway trains and a double-decker bus, just as British Prime Minister Tony Blair was hosting a Group of Eight summit in Scotland.
The dead included four suicide bombers, all Muslims and three of them born and raised in Britain. One of the bombers appeared in video, seen several weeks later, which suggested a link with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network.
Peroxide-based explosives, some incorporating ball-bearings or nails as projectiles, were found in a car the bombers had used to drive to a suburban train station on the morning of the attack.
The ”Dirty Money” programme recalled that police began investigating the financing of the attacks as soon as they had established the identities of the four male bombers.
One of the suicide bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan, a teaching assistant, is suspected by police of having been the principal backer of the attacks, giving money to the others to buy some of the material they needed.
”Detectives also discovered that the men had prepared for their own deaths,” BBC Online reported. ”They paid off some of their debts and at least one bomber is understood to have written a will.”
Douglas Greenburg, who studied the financing of the September 11 attacks, underlined the difficulty in trying to pinpoint terrorists through financial channels.
”If you have someone who is working and depositing their pay cheques into the bank, and periodically withdrawing money and at night buying components for a bomb, constructing a bomb in their basement, what’s the bank going to do about that?” he told ”Dirty Money”. – AFP
