Parsons Green tube attack: Heartbreak of foster couple who only wanted to help

Just like anyone else who was going to meet the Queen, Ronald and Penelope Jones got dressed up to the nines for the occasion.

He donned a smart morning suit and his crispest white shirt while she put on her best dress and wore a fascinator in her short grey hair.

Then it was off to Buckingham Palace to receive their MBEs for “services to children and families” from Her Majesty in person.

And what services they were. By the time they received their awards in 2009 the couple had fostered more than 250 children.

“We do it because we find it rewarding,” she said at the time.

“Helping other people is rewarding, and I treat them how I would like to be treated if I was in that situation.”

A few years later, Ron and Penny – as they are known to friends and family – decided they would give up fostering and enjoy a well-earned retirement.

After all, Penny is 71 and her husband, at 88, is frail enough to require the use of a mobility scooter.

Not the kind of age when you want to be dealing with truculent teenagers.

However, their kind hearts got the better of them.

The Joneses were so moved by the plight of child refugees arriving in Europe from far-flung war zones that they decided once again to open the door of their lilac-painted home in Sunbury-on-Thames, Surrey, to children in need.

It proved to be a fateful decision that set in train a course of events that culminated in a raid on their home by armed police on Saturday afternoon.

One of their charges, a teenage orphan from Iraq, had been arrested on suspicion of planting the Parsons Green Tube bomb, which had injured 30 people the day before, and the security services needed to scour his home for evidence.

The Joneses’ role as foster parents dates back to December 1970, when Penny was working with juveniles in the prison service. While discussing one particular youth with social workers, she remarked that if he was properly cared for he would be less troublesome: “They said, ‘We’ve got just the child for you’.”

And so, at the age of 24, Penny – with the full support of her significantly older husband – took on a 16-year-old tearaway.

“If I wasn’t being called out to a police station, I was patching him up in casualty,” she said later.

But the experience did not put her off.

Indeed, she and her husband found the role so rewarding that a few years later they requested another placement… and then another, and another… “We open our hearts to all the children,” she said in an interview after being given her MBE.

“Anybody that comes to us we will do whatever we can to help them with whatever they need.”

She added: “There must have been hundreds of children. I try to stay in touch with them. Some have been adopted. I send them birthday cards. It’s a very extended family.”

In all Penny and Ron – who have also raised six children of their own – have fostered 268 children in the home they call “the mad house” that they have lived in for the entirety of their married life.

As Serena Barber, 45, a long-term family friend, says: “Penny’s a wonderful foster mother. She takes everyone, she doesn’t turn anyone away.”

Following the Joneses’ return to the fray after their short-lived retirement, youngsters from countries including Eritrea, Syria, Albania and Afghanistan came and went. As Penny once said: “They’re all children, it doesn’t matter if they’re sky blue or with pink dots on – they just need to be loved.”

However, one particular boy was immune to their caring natures.

He had left his native Iraq as a 15-year-old and made his way across Europe to the so-called Jungle camp at Calais before crossing the Channel by smuggling himself in the back of a lorry.

He was duly processed at a migrant centre in Kent and granted entry on the grounds he was an unaccompanied minor.

At some point he was taken in by Penny and Ron.

On the face of it, they were well qualified to cope with a traumatised teenager from a war-torn country having dealt with similar cases in the past.

But as they knew from experience such children can struggle with issues that go much deeper than conventional teenage angst.

As Penny once said: “Sometimes, watching the news, they can get so worked up that they have to leave the house and go for a walk. It’s awful to see and it’s so difficult for them. We just try to support where we can.”

Their Iraqi charge proved to be unreceptive, however.

There was at least one blazing row with Ron outside the house that was witnessed by a neighbour, the police were frequent visitors to the Joneses £340,000 property and after the 18-year-old was arrested two weeks ago – for reasons that remain unclear at this stage – even Penny had had enough.

“After that Penny said she was going to have to stop caring for him, she couldn’t handle him,” says Barber, who describes the boy as “awful”.

While his foster parents were going about their daily duties, their teenage charge may have been plotting mass murder.

The crude bucket bomb left on the District Line Tube train may well have been made in his bedroom at Ron and Penny’s home.

The security minister Ben Wallace has confirmed that the homemade device contained triacetone triperoxide (TATP), an explosive known as “Mother of Satan” due to its highly unstable properties.

TATP, which can be produced using chemicals widely available on the high street, has become a hallmark of Isis terrorists, including the Manchester Arena bomber.

“It’s simple,” says Dr Sidney Alford, an explosives engineer.

“It takes only about a couple of hours to make, then you need to filter it and wash it and dry it.

“How long it takes to dry depends on your facilities but in a normal house with a radiator or something to stand it on, you could leave it overnight.”

One neighbour of the Joneses reportedly said that police had told her that a bomb had been found in the garden and that there were firearms under the floorboards.

Within hours of the 18-year-old’s arrest in Dover, police arrested a 21-year-old Syrian man called Yahya Faroukh outside the takeaway shop in Hounslow, west London, where he worked. It soon emerged that he too had been fostered by the couple.

Faroukh is thought to be from Al Harah near Damascus and appears to have fled to Egypt before taking a boat across the Mediterranean to Italy.

At some point after reaching the UK he was placed with the Joneses and began studying at West Thames College but by the time of his arrest he had moved out and was living in a flat near Heathrow airport.

As Penny and Ron stay with friends while they wait for the police to complete a forensic search of their home, they can only regret that a career in fostering has ended so badly.

“To say they are gutted is an understatement,” says a friend of the couple. “For this to happen after all the kids they have fostered, and for it to ruin everything… questions have to be asked about what checks were made and who decided to place him with them.”