Smash hit

But even these extraordinary security measures failed to stop Palestinian suicide bombers from slipping through the net.

In the end, Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, and his securocrats decided that the only effective counter-measure was to imprison the entire Palestinian population behind a 10m-high anti-suicide bomber fence.

Such security measures are simply inconceivable in modern Britain. Imagine trying to check the baggage on just one train of the Heathrow Express.

Even if the entire British Army’s manpower, 144,000 troops, were deployed to protect Central London there would still be insufficient security guards to search every bag or check every commuter on even a quiet Saturday morning.

Whoever it was who died for Allah and their own twisted version of Islamic beliefs below King’s Cross or on the Tavistock Square bus they were not the first Britons to become suicide bombers.

In April 2003, two British citizens, Asif Hanif, 19, from Hounslow, and Omar Sharif, 27, from Derby, travelled to Israel to die for their God.

Both men attempted to suicide bomb Mike’s Place, a Western-style rock bar on the Tel Aviv seafront, before being stopped by an alert security guard.

Hanif managed to detonate his bomb and kill himself and two others, although Sharif’s suicide vest failed to explode and his body was later found in the sea.

Before their death, both men took part in the ritual video denouncing Tony Blair and George Bush in a familiar hothead-style rant.

Chillingly neither Hanif nor Sharif had vowed for death in revenge for the atrocities of the Israeli Army in their home village on the West Bank. Both men had spent their entire lives in the safety of the British state.

They became infected with a virus of the cult of suicide bombing from fiery sermons in Finsbury Park Mosque and from jihadist websites on the internet.

You don’t have to be oppressed in the old sense to take up suicide bombing.

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