simonshack 4 Aug 27 2010, 09:01 PM wrote:
Now, how many days exactly did these mourning people (brandishing fliers to the press photographers) wander around the streets of London "looking for their loved ones"?
4 days of running around London, posing for photographers for Miriam Hyman’s friends.
http://www.miriam-hyman.com/miriam.html
Question:
Why did the media on the days following 7 July not show more posters like this?:
- People who turned out NOT to be one of the 52 dead.
The total number of missing person reports each year is likely fall in the range of 210,000 to 230,000 in any one year
27,570 missing person reports were made in the Greater London Metropolitan Police area alone in 1999/2000. (Biehal et al, 2003: 3).
http://www.missingpeople.org.uk/media-c ... p?dsid=603
Given how common it is for people to go missing ? aside from terror attacks ? isn’t it remarkable that all the missing posters and searching relatives seen in the media archives in July 2005 turn out to be bone fide 7/7 people.
Why does the media not give us pictures of anguished, searching families whose beloved child eventually turned out to have merely gone for an impromptu dirty weekend in Brighton?
If that is how families behave when their relative is missing - rushing to London to brandish posters - London should have been swarming with searching people whose child did eventually turn up, unharmed having simply been one of the thousands of missing people who don’t get killed in terror attacks every month.
The media's searching relatives on 9 July 2005:
Given the approx 27,000 people who go missing in London in a typical year, why were there not any relatives photographed, whose loved one turned out to have simply absconded, or over-dosed on heroin in a squat?
As Simon highlighted above, the final number of victims was still rising as of 10 July, so
anyone with a missing relative at that point could legitimately be leaping in front of photographers at King's Cross and Edgeware Road, wielding posters.
But
all the missing posters we see turn out to be one of the 52.
Where are the false alarms?
ps.
I'll be checking the figures and sources a bit more, but it seems that about 100 people go missing in London everyday. Did none of their relatives fear they were caught in the bombings? How did the media psychically manage to filter out any photogenic people with false alarms?
edit:
Half the Missing Posters should have been for non-7/7 Missing people
A sceptical response to the figures above might include this view:
Most missing people are kids who would not be expected to be among London’s tube-travelling commuters. So their families ? if they have families ? would not look for them at King’s Cross etc.
Indeed this Home Office/Police report shows that in London, for the year 97-98, almost 70% of missing people reports were kids.
["Metropolitan" = London Police Force]
http://rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/prgpdfs/fprs114.pdf
Since I don’t have 2005 figures let’s just try those figures from the Home Office.
32,000 missing person reports in London in one year. 70% are kids.
That leaves 9,600 adults missing in one year ? that’s 26 missing adults reported in London each day.(in a year without major terror events).
So, let's estimate 26 missing adults each day in London due to non-al quaeda factors.
Taking only those 26 ? forgetting those who would have gone missing in the days and weeks before and were still missing on 7 July? why weren’t any of their families photographed and interviewed at King’s Cross etc by mainstream media, putting up special 7/7 posters for Peter Macdiarmid to file off to Getty Images?
Shouldn't up to half of the searching families broadcast in the media have turned out to be not 7/7 families after all?
(perhaps Getty Images has removed their files of Missing Posters for people who turned out not have been 7/7 vicsims ?I’ll e mail them and ask.)
Estranged but not "Missing"
Even more people should have been slapping up posters than the figures suggest (that is, if the
poster-putting-up behaviour is natural).
People don’t necessarily file their relative as officially Missing, even if they have lost contact with them. Especially with the disruption of the phone network on 7/7, there must have been plenty of worried people. Let’s say they didn’t even know their London relative's phone number and had no way to alleviate their anxiety except by travelling to London. If anything would make them take that trip, it would be a major terror attack.
If it is natural behaviour to slap Missing posters all over the place and accost journalists, then why weren’t there hundreds
more people doing so whose relatives turned out
not to have been 7/7 victims?
If you think it’s far-fetched for me to suggest that estranged and out-of-town relatives should have been rushing into London to slap up Missing Posters when they didn’t even know if their kids were in the country, and that there should have been 100s of them?.
Well you’re right I’m sure.
Except that scenario is exactly what the plot of official 7/7 drama "London River" (2009) asks us to believe...
The Mother of a victim sails in from Guernsey, discovering unknown sides to her daughter (Muslim boyfriend).
The Father of a victim from Africa arrives to seek the adult son he has not seen since childhood.
They discover some receipts for Eurostar tickets and temporarily believe their kids must be on holiday in Paris?
Despite the voyages of self-discovery, they find time to behave like this:
edit:
;) before anyone slams my maths, i realise that it might be more accurate to say that a third of the missing posters should be for non 7/7 people. (26 non-7/7 missing and 52 7/7 missing.)
But since we're dealing in estimates, and not all the vicsims had famlies or missing posters, i'll leave that "half" uncorrected for now.