Crime against humanity

Atrocities come at us in waves, starting with the half-understood horror flashed up by reporters on 24-hour news duty, who burst with nothing yet to tell.

After the first shocks come the political responses, then the unspeakable details of a sort once confined to the battlefield. This shouldn't be happening, we don't want to read about it or hear another detail - except that we do, because this is inescapably a part of modern life.

We may escape personally, avoiding death or injury to ourselves or our loved ones, but we don't really escape. Such deaths shock and sadden us all in their pointless cruelty.

The victims and the survivors, the injured and the missing - they stand for all races and beliefs, coming from all corners of the city and the planet.

That so many people of different creed and colour should have been killed or injured by last Thursday's terrorist atrocities in London reinforces the idea that this was a crime against humanity - all humanity - and not simply a crime against Britain.

Shockingly, the perpetrators of the London bombings are now thought to have been British-born Muslim fundamentalists from Leeds on a suicide mission. Because of this, it would be easy to turn against all Muslims - easy but so very wrong. To hate all Muslims because of what a lethally demented few did last Thursday would be to fall into the mental stink-hole of the terrorists who carried out the dreadful acts.

Whatever the reasons, whatever the provocations, this is where hatred gets us - innocent people murdered as they go about their ordinary business. And if we hate right back, our hatred ends up costing other innocent lives.

The roll-call of the missing presumed dead is the tragic emblem of such atrocities, and it is no surprise that the fate of one woman in particular has caused much comment. Shahera Akther Islam embodies so perfectly the sense of pointless loss: 20, beautiful, loved by many and a devout Muslim - murdered by others apparently of her own faith.

That's if anyone of any faith could choreograph such horror. Isn't faith meant to lead us away from such violence? It's a nice theory but one that often seems to head in the opposite direction.

I first started to read about the missing in our back garden on Saturday afternoon. The sun was out, brewing a heat-wave. Flowers were doing their pollen-puffed stuff all around me. And there on the page in front of me was a list of people who had left home on Thursday morning and never came back.

The missing offer such a potent image of loss, their lives almost certainly ended with brutal suddenness - yet so unexpectedly that hope lingers, at least until dreadful confirmation comes.

Reading about the missing brought home how one atrocity contains so many sad stories, with so much loss attending on each death.

Those who died were Christians and Muslims, Hindus and Jews - a multicultural, internationalist roll-call, and it is in such diversity that modern Britain finds its strength.

As happened in New York after 9/11, the handbills and the posters soon appeared, desperately appealing for information about lost loved ones. Every story is a tragic interruption, every death demands something. The response should be justice, certainly - but not vengeance.

One incidental aspect of the London bombings has been what might be called the democratisation of news. Some of the most potent images came from mobile phone cameras, shot as the terrifying events unfolded. In a way, this was news delivered by the people for the people, without the intervention of journalists. It wasn't really this, as the amateur footage had to pass through professional hands, yet there was a sense here of technology bringing about a change in how news is gathered.

Thanks to mobiles, everyone - apart from mobile-free dinosaurs such as me - can go out armed with the equipment to record news as it happens. This is new and, almost certainly, a good thing.

Updated: 10:59 Thursday, July 14, 2005