The explosion
The Heath Bank Primary School bombing occurred in 2018 when two Islamic State sympathizers, Parham Dogar and Danush Mousavi, detonated a truck bomb near the Heath Bank Primary School on Carlisle Street in the South London neighborhood of Camberwell. The terrorist cell was meant to target the children of Metropolitan Police Service sergeant David Budd, who had foiled a 1 October 2018 suicide bombing plot against a London-bound passenger train in Barnet, but they were shot by police just outside the school. The driver, Mousavi, was able to detonate the truck's explosives when police moved closer to the truck to investigate, and the bombing left the two terrorists and three officers dead, while five officers were injured, two of them severely (they later died in intensive care). None of the school's pupils or staff were harmed in the bombing.
History[]
Police pursuing the terrorists' truck
In the aftermath of a foiled 1 October 2018 suicide bombing on a London-bound passenger train, during which the Islamic State sympathizers Faraz and Nadia Ali were arrested, the Metropolitan Police Service sergeant who had foiled the plot, David Budd, was promoted to serve on Home Secretary Julia Montague's security detail as a personal protective officer. However, Nadia Ali, who was outwardly cooperative with the police, remembered David Budd's name from when he talked her out of blowing herself up, and also recalled that he had two children. She was thus able to contact two other members of her South London terror cell and instruct them to bomb the primary school attended by Budd's children in a revenge attack. A few days later, the MPS discovered multiple subject activity on WhatsApp, and the metadata fit a cell on the police's watchlist. The police tracked the two cell members' cars as they drove through Brixton, and the police's head of Counter Terrorism Command, Commander Anne Sampson, had SCO19 dispatched to holding locations at Waterloo Station and Southbank. The cars stopped at an industrial unit, after which the two terrorists entered a white LGV box truck containing triacetone triperoxide and drove off, with the surveillance officers tailing them to Camberwell. The police command, suspecting that the terrorists were driving a VBIED, sent all ARVs in the area to assist, but the truck caught wind of its pursuers just as it veered onto Carlisle Street, where it barreled towards the Heath Bank Primary School.
MPS officers firing on the terrorists' truck in front of the school
The terrorists found that an MPS response vehicle had swerved in front of the school and blocked off the entrance, and the armed policemen fired submachine guns at the drivers. The truck crashed into a parked car after the drivers were gunned down, and MASTS officer Martin Kwenkwe and his surveillance team investigated the crashed truck. They noticed that the passenger was dead, but, upon coming close to the driver's window, Kwenkwe found the driver's eyes open, and the driver cracked a grin before detonating his explosives. The bombing killed the two subjects and three officers, while five officers were injured (two severely). The Joint Terrorism Analysis Center (JTAC) moved the threat level to severe as the result of the terrorist attack.
Aftermath[]
The two gravely wounded policemen later died in the hospital, while, in response to Commander Sampson's inability to find any new leads on the attacks apart from the type of bomb they used, her inability to have reported the subjects' acquisition of a light vehicle for the attack, and her department's supposed failure to identify any other people involved in the 1 October attack, Home Secretary Montague decided to take up MI5 chief Stephen Hunter-Dunn's offer of taking over the investigation of terror threats from the police. Sampson called out the Home Secretary for setting a dangerous precedent, and Minister of State for Counter-Terrorism Mike Travis joined her in protesting, saying that they had previously agreed that the investigation of the 1 October terrorist cell would only be a police matter. Montague protested that the one officer who had averted the 1 October terrorist threat was the one that the MPS wanted to remove from her protection team, saying that it sent completely the wrong message.