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The New York Times
British Hunt for Bomb
Suspects
By ALAN COWELL and
RAYMOND BONNER, From the nytimes.com June 30, 2007
LONDON, June 30 — As London
braced for a weekend of high-profile public events, the British police stepped
up foot patrols on Saturday and hunted for suspects linked to what appeared to
be a double car-bombing plot modeled on terrorist tactics in Iraq.
Counterterrorism experts suggested, however, that the bombers who abandoned two
explosives-laden Mercedes sedans in central London may have been what a senior
Western official called “less directed from Al Qaeda and more a matter of a
home-grown group.”
Several experts and officials said the technology behind the foiled bombings
seemed to be amateurish. While the attackers apparently attempted to
detonate the bombs using cellphones, “they didn’t go off because there were not
top-grade people putting them together,” the Western official said, speaking in
return for anonymity because he was not authorized to brief reporters.
If the plot turns out to be the work of a small, hitherto undetected cell, that
could raise alarms that Britain’s terrorism threat is broader than the 2,000
suspected radicals known to the authorities, according to British and Western
officials. “If we had never heard of them before, it means the problem is
even bigger,” a British official said, speaking according to the same ground
rules. The Western official said British investigators were pursuing
several “good leads.”
The public events in London this weekend include the annual Gay Pride march on
Saturday, the Wimbledon tennis tournament and a huge concert on Sunday in memory
of Diana, Princess of Wales, who died 10 years ago.
No one took responsibility publicly for the foiled attack, thwarted almost by
accident when an ambulance crew and traffic wardens on Friday separately
discovered the sedans packed with gasoline, gas canisters and nails.
But an online forum monitored by the SITE Institute, which tracks jihadist Web
sites, asked whether London had been “craving explosions from Al Qaeda” after
authorities in June bestowed a knighthood on the author Salman Rushdie, reviled
by some radical Muslims for his book “The Satanic Verses.”
No “established link” exists between the knighthood and the foiled bombings, a
British security official said, speaking in return for anonymity, but the
posting on the jihadist site was likely to be closely scrutinized by
investigators.
The British news media have asserted that if the bombs had gone off they would
likely have caused havoc and huge loss of life, but some experts have questioned
the level of sophistication involved in the devices, which officials call
vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices.
The Times of London reported Saturday that the police had warned nightclub
operators a few days ago of the threat of such attacks. But a European law
enforcement official, who spoke in return for anonymity, said the construction
of the devices “does not look very professional.”
The two cars were parked just around a corner from each other. The first
to be discovered and disarmed was found outside the Tiger nightclub on the
Haymarket near Piccadilly Circus. The second was towed away for a parking
infraction about 90 minutes later from nearby Cockspur Street leading to
Trafalgar Square, the police said.
In the United States, Strategic Forecasting, a private research group, said the
“amateur construction” of the explosive device “and the way it was placed
suggest the plotter or plotters have no connection to a major militant
organization.”
Sajjan M. Gohel, a security expert, said a theory pursued by the police was that
the two bombs were designed to explode one after the other — the first to bring
people into the street and the second to cause mass loss of life. The fact
that Thursday night at Tiger was ladies’ night, he said, recalled a conspiracy
in 2004 in which British-born bombers said they wanted to attack women at a
nightclub, whom they viewed as promiscuous, in conversations monitored by
British intelligence.
In their hunt for bombers, the British police say they are poring over thousands
of images from the closed-circuit television cameras that film the streets of
central London.
While ABC news reported that the British authorities had a clear picture of the
Haymarket bomber, doubts persisted Saturday about its likely quality.
British officials said the image, especially at night, is not as clear as the
ABC report suggested. But the European law enforcement official said that
London’s cameras were “very sophisticated” and that it would be surprising if
the cameras had not recorded clear images.
While the identity of the alleged bombers was unclear, British officials were
examining their detailed records of suspects who have been identified in earlier
conspiracies but may have slipped out of sight.
Dexter Filkins and William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.
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