By ALAN COWELL; Published: June
30, 2007
LONDON, June 29 — London was
gripped by a terrorist threat on Friday
when the police found two Mercedes sedans packed with gasoline, nails
and gas canisters that had been parked near Piccadilly Circus in the
bustling West End entertainment district.
The police defused both bombs, but had they exploded “there could have
been significant injury or loss of life,” Peter Clarke, Britain’s
senior counterterrorism police official, told reporters.
Hours later, Mr. Clarke told another news conference at New Scotland
Yard that the second car, illegally parked in Cockspur Street a few
hundred yards from the first in the Haymarket, had been rigged like the
first, adding, “The vehicles are clearly linked.”
Security experts said that neither the bomb materials nor the cellphone
triggering device was particularly sophisticated. Nor, said Sajjan M.
Gohel, a counterterrorism expert with the Asia-Pacific Foundation, did
the attack “seem to be very well planned.”
But the idea of a multiple attack using car bombs — a departure from
the backpack suicide attacks of the London bombings of July 2005 —
raised concerns among security experts that jihadist groups linked to
Al Qaeda may have imported tactics more familiar in Iraq.
Both bombs seem to have been discovered by accident.
In the first case, an ambulance crew alerted the police after seeing
what it thought was smoke inside a silver-green Mercedes parked outside
the Tiger Tiger nightclub on the Haymarket. The police defused an
explosive device there by hand in the early morning, but did not reveal
the episode until hours later.
Then, after a day of growing tensions and reports of a second bomb, the
police confirmed Friday night that they had found a blue Mercedes
rigged to explode in a car pound on upscale Park Lane, where it was
stowed after being ticketed and towed away. Traffic agents said they
had smelled gasoline fumes coming from the vehicle.
The car was towed around 3:30 a.m., roughly two and a half hours after
the discovery of the first vehicle, the police said. If the cars were
supposed to explode in spectacular fashion, the plot had clearly gone
awry.
ABC News reported that British security officials said they had seen a
“crystal clear” image on a security tape of the driver jumping from the
green Mercedes, and that he bore “a close resemblance” to a man
arrested in an earlier bomb plot but released for lack of evidence.
A British security official confirmed in an interview on Friday that
the authorities were concerned that the supposed attacker might have
been a person already known to the authorities who had slipped out of
sight after “crossing the radar” in a separate conspiracy.
In recent weeks, several terrorism suspects who were supposed to be
restricted in their movements by so-called control orders have
disappeared, but they most likely fled abroad, the official said.
The attempted bombings, as well as the potential for further violence,
posed an immediate challenge to the newly installed prime minister,
Gordon Brown, who convened a meeting of Britain’s top security
committee — called Cobra, for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A — to
assess the severity of the situation.
“As the police and security services have said on so many occasions, we
face a serious and continuous threat to our country,” Mr. Brown said.
“But this incident does recall the need for us to be vigilant at all
times and the public to be alert at any potential incidents.”
In Washington, counterterrorism officials said that they were following
the investigation in London closely, but that they had received no
credible reports of possible threats inside the United States, although
they urged heightened vigilance with the approach of the Fourth of July
holiday.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a bulletin on Friday urging
local authorities to step up their watchfulness even though there had
been no credible threat reports.
In the course of a jittery day in London, the police barred people and
vehicles from Park Lane and urged others to leave adjoining Hyde Park
because officers had suspicions, later confirmed, about the car in the
underground parking lot.
Fleet Street, leading from central London to the traditional financial
district to the east, was also cordoned off, but later reopened. The
closings left tracts of central London in gridlock on a busy Friday
afternoon when streets are normally packed.
“It’s only when I got to work that I realized what was happening,” said
Renee Anderson, 32, a New Zealander from her country’s nearby
diplomatic mission. “I feel surprisingly all right about it. We all
kind of thought, ‘Well, you could be hit by a bus anyway.’”
A police officer in London today, examining a vehicle believed to
contain an explosive device.
News of the developments broke over Britain’s breakfast tables when a
police spokesman said explosives experts had discovered a “potentially
viable explosive device” in a vehicle. British news organizations
quoted witnesses as saying police officers had been seen removing what
appeared to be propane gas cylinders and a large number of nails from
the car.
Sky News quoted a witness who said the car had been driven erratically
before it collided with garbage bins, and that the driver had run off.
Mr. Clarke, the counterterrorism official, could not confirm that
version of events.
The Tiger Tiger nightclub was packed with hundreds of people at the
time the first bomb was discovered. One woman at the club, Rajeshree
Patel, told the BBC that the Mercedes had all its doors open and its
headlights on. “I think there would have been a lot of fatalities” if
the car had exploded, she said. “There were approximately 500 people
inside Tiger Tiger at the time.”
The presence of gas cylinders recalled a 2004 terrorist plot called the
“Gas Limos Project,” in which Dhiren Barot, a British Muslim accused of
being a leading Al Qaeda figure, had planned to use limousines packed
with gas cylinders to blow up buildings. In a 39-page planning
document, Mr. Barot, who was sentenced in November to a minimum of 40
years in prison, recommended the use of gas cylinders because they were
highly destructive and easy to obtain.
In another plot, terrorists were said to have planned to attack the
Ministry of Sound, one of London’s biggest nightclubs, using a
fertilizer bomb.
Haymarket is in an area of bars, shops and theaters that draws tens of
thousands of visitors and revelers. Two theaters on the Haymarket
canceled Friday night performances.
The discovery was made one day after the new prime minister, Mr. Brown,
formed his first government and close to the second anniversary of the
bombings of July 7, 2005, in which four suicide bombers killed 52
people on the London subway system.
The counterterrorism command, headed by Mr. Clarke, has led several
major investigations into suspected jihadist conspiracies that have
proliferated in Britain since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In those investigations, suspected terrorists have been accused by the
police of planning to use a variety of weapons, including the poison
ricin, fertilizer bombs and liquid explosives to attack an array of
targets like a shopping mall, a nightclub and airplanes on
trans-Atlantic routes.
Jack Straw, who was appointed justice minister by Mr. Brown, said
government members had been told about the discovery several hours
before the police statement, which was made public as the morning rush
hour got under way.
There was no immediate change in the threat level declared by the
British authorities. According to the Web site of MI5, the British
domestic security service, the current level stands at severe, meaning
an attack is “highly likely,” as it has been since August 2006.
Some Londoners said Friday’s alert heightened the sense of suspicion
surrounding people of different backgrounds.
With the latest scare, said Sanjay Karsan, 22, a Briton of Indian
descent, “I’m worrying that if I walk up that road, they’re going to
suspect me.”
Reporting was contributed by Pamela Kent, Beth Gardiner and Raymond
Bonner from London, and David Johnston and Mark Mazzetti from
Washington.
|
