By Tom Hundley
Chicago Tribune
Copyright 2007 Chicago Tribune
LONDON — A pair of Mercedes sedans packed with nails and canisters of propane gas was apparently intended to bring Baghdad-style carnage to the heart of London’s theater district early Friday morning. Miraculously, both car bombs failed to detonate.
If either had exploded, the result would have been “significant injury or loss of life,” said Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist unit. The number of casualties “certainly could have been into the hundreds,” he said.
No group has claimed responsibility, and so far there have been no arrests. But security experts said the failed attack had all the markings of a well-planned jihadist terrorism operation.
The first vehicle was discovered near Piccadilly Circus in the Haymarket area about 1 a.m. after an ambulance crew had been summoned to a nearby nightclub on an unrelated matter.
A member of the crew noticed smoke coming from a silver-green Mercedes parked in front of the Tiger Tiger nightclub. A police bomb squad arrived at the scene and disabled what they described as a “potentially explosive device.”
Reports in the British media, unconfirmed by Scotland Yard, said a mobile phone had been rigged as a detonator.
The area around Piccadilly Circus was, as usual for that hour, crowded with nightclub patrons, theatergoers having a late dinner and tourists.
Police immediately shut down streets in the vicinity, rerouted traffic and began searching for possible suspects and other suspicious vehicles.
The search, and the disruptions, continued throughout the morning as jittery Londoners remained on high alert.
By midafternoon, police were called to an underground parking garage on Park Lane, an area of deluxe hotels near Hyde Park. Attendants at the garage noticed a strong smell of gasoline coming from a blue Mercedes that was in a section of the garage used by local authorities to impound cars towed for parking violations.
The second Mercedes “was found to contain very similar materials to those that had been found in the first car,” Clarke said at a news conference.
The two vehicles, he said, “are clearly linked.”
According to police, the second Mercedes was ticketed at 2:30 a.m. for being illegally parked on Cockspur Street, a few blocks away from where the first car was discovered at the other end of Haymarket. It was towed about an hour later.
It is not clear when the bombs were supposed to detonate or why they had failed to go off.
The botched attack comes a little more than a week before the second anniversary of the July 7 London bombings when four British Muslims killed 52 commuters in suicide attacks on the city’s transit system.
It also comes on the second full day of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s administration. Brown vowed to step up the battle against domestic terrorism, and newly appointed Home Secretary Jacqui Smith warned that Al Qaeda-inspired terrorists still pose a grave threat to the nation.
“We are currently facing the most serious and sustained threat to our security from international terrorists,” Smith said. “While we can minimize the risks, we can never eliminate them.”
Although police have not yet identified any suspects, the center of London is watched by scores of surveillance cameras. The vehicles and bomb devices should also yield a significant amount of forensic evidence.
Since the 2005 attack, about 2,000 individuals and 200 jihadist cells have been tracked throughout Britain.