WHERE do you turn if you have failed to kill yourself in a suicide-bombing mission?

These are not Second World War kamikaze pilots who often had their cockpit covers screwed down so that they would not chicken out at the last minute, and whose families would be in deep disgrace if they returned. The coven of failed bombers will have kept their intentions hidden from those close to them. Yet they must know that their descriptions and pictures are everywhere. So a simple return home to answer searching questions may be out of the question.

The bombers themselves will doubtless be confused. Having prepared themselves for the final, fatal act they are now in a psychological purgatory, neither in the heaven they aspired to nor in the hell they must feel they were getting away from.

Interviews with would-be Palestinian suicide bombers have revealed that they were not always idealists committed to a well-understood cause. Some had volunteered only a few weeks earlier. They often did not have a detailed understanding of the purpose of the destruction they intended, but were motivated by personal experiences.

The London bombers do not live under an occupying force but they may believe they do. They may not have suffered the daily insults of a foreign army but may have formed a view that killing themselves in the name of a “cause” was the only way to regain personal pride. It is this intention to kill themselves that must be kept in mind when trying to determine how the bombers are thinking and feeling now.

Suicide by young men is such a serious problem in Britain that it is a declared NHS target to reduce the occurrence. So it is no coincidence that these bombers are broadly of the same age and gender as the many others who kill themselves at the stage between adolescence and manhood when the pressures can seem too great and the only way out is seen to be death. If such confusions are channelled by manipulative adults and dressed with the plaudits of courage and martyrdom then vulnerable young men will succumb.

But after the event, will the psychological processes that got these young men to that plight still remain? For some, they doubtless will. The best predictor of whether a person will commit suicide is whether they have already attempted it. Some of these bombers may kill themselves out of shame. Some may strive to survive and bomb another day, but their masters may be reluctant to trust them again, and the bombers may be reluctant to trust the bombmakers whose weapons failed.

The evil minds behind the outrage may plan for years but the people delivering the bombs will probably have no more idea of what their target actually is or how it will relate to the actions of other bombers than the victims whose lives they destroy. Such bombers do not appear to be deranged, mesmerised fanatics or people who are mentally ill. Rather, they are frustrated, confused followers believing that their actions can achieve some rather ambiguous goal of a “better world”.

The act of bombing will have been the focus for resolving their frustrations; now it has failed they will be thrown back on their own limited intellectual and emotional resources. Some failed bombers who have been interviewed have been intelligent enough to review their circumstances and consider that there may be other ways to achieve their objectives.

The author is Director of the Centre for Investigative Psychology at the University of Liverpool

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