Did London Bombers Intend To Die?

Experts Bewildered By Evidence Linked To July 7 Attackers

(CBS/AP)  They bought roundtrip train tickets and paid for long-term parking — two of the details that are prompting the intelligence community to question if the four London bombers intended to die.

On July 7, Hasib Hussain, Shahzad Tanweer, and Mohammad Sidique Khan traveled to Luton, north of London, to meet with Jermaine Lindsay.

According to experts who have been briefed by police, they parked a rental car outside the train station and paid to park for seven days, then purchased roundtrip tickets to London. Police later found explosives in the car.

CBS News Correspondent Richard Roth reports that analysts are still perplexed why men on a one-way suicide mission bought round-trip train tickets.

"Although these people all died with their bombs, it is far from clear to me that they knew they were going to die," said Michael Clarke, a terrorism analyst.

When the men arrived at King's Cross station in the British capital, they split up and attacked three Tube trains and a bus — killing 52 people and themselves.

No suicide notes or videotaped messages for their families have surfaced as has happened in attacks elsewhere.

"The roundtrip tickets, the fact that one of them spent a lot recently repairing his car and one of them had a family and was the teacher of the disabled and underprivileged children, it doesn't ring right," said Paul Beaver, a security and defense expert in London with close police contacts. "If you had that much commitment, how are you going to take your life? It's happened in Palestine, but these people were brought up in the UK."

The four men could have been duped into thinking they were carrying timed bombs and would be able to get away, Beaver said. He pointed to the fact that the bombs would have caused much more damage if detonated in stations, which could suggest they were not expected to immediately explode.

"The thing is we won't know that until we knew more about the detonation systems, which is what the forensic boys are doing now," he said.

Beaver said he did not put much stock in the theory that three of the bombs must have had timers because they exploded in quick succession. "It could be, but it isn't very difficult to synchronize your watches," he said.

The bombers' behavior also could have been designed to avoid suspicion, Beaver said. "The more normal you can be, the less conspicuous you are — you have to be a gray man," he said.

The same tactic was used by the Sept. 11 suicide pilots who lived and studied in Hamburg, Germany — Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah — who used legal passports, dressed as Westerners and did nothing to draw the attention of authorities.

The Sept. 11 hijackers bought one-way plane tickets. Since the attacks on the United States, airlines have been running security checks on passengers who purchase one-way tickets or pay with cash.