The complicated story of Damon Smith, a bomb and autism

In 2017, Damon Smith was sentenced to 15 years in prison for planting a bomb on a London Tube train. But without a lawyer or jury that understood his Asperger’s, was it a fair trial? Katie Glass reports

On the first day of his trial, the judge asked the jury to disregard Smith’s grin, a trait of his Asperger’s (PA)

At 10.30am on 20 October 2016, 19-year-old Damon Smith boarded a Jubilee line train at Surrey Quays station with a bomb ticking in his black Adidas rucksack. It was timed to explode at 11.02am. At 10.49am, CCTV captured Smith leaving the Underground. There was no sign of the bag.

It was at almost 11am, as the train approached Canary Wharf station, that two passengers spotted it. They alerted the driver who, seeing wires protruding from it, called the authorities for help. As the train and platform were urgently evacuated, scattering fearful commuters into the street, North Greenwich station was cordoned off and explosive experts dispatched to the scene.

Seven months later, Smith stood in the dock at the Old Bailey accused of planting a bomb on the London Underground. It was the week of the Manchester Arena attack. In those awful days, after an Islamist suicide bomber senselessly slaughtered 22 children and adults at a teenage pop gig, it felt like the whole country was in grief. Smith grinned through his trial. He’d constructed his bomb from a £2 Tesco alarm clock and flask. If it had detonated, the Met’s head of counter-terrorism, Dean Haydon, said, it would have “caused mass casualties”.