The explosions in London look like an attempt to recreate the Madrid bombings and would have been planned for months, a leading terrorism expert said on Thursday as the capital began to come to terms with an apparently coordinated attack.
Michael Clarke, director of the Centre for Defence Studies at King’s College London, said six bombs would mean at least 24 people involved in planting them in a targeted operation. The fact that London had been hit when the resources of the security forces were focused on the G8 summit at Gleneagles indicated some clever thinking by terrorists.
“It will have been quite a big plot and months in the planning,” said Clarke, who declined to speculate who was behind the attacks.
“The way to really bring a city to a halt is to explode some more bombs when the rescue services are running around,” he added.
Earlier, Clarke had outlined the security operation for the London Olympics that the British authorities would have to mount.
He said it would be a “pretty severe headache” for the Metropolitan police and warned that the games would inevitably be a target for extremists — even if the overall terrorist threat had receded by then.
“I cannot think of anything comparable that would be as big as this,” he said. “The Millennium celebrations, the Queen’s golden jubilee, the Trafalgar fleet review — these were either military events or essentially domestic.
“This will be the biggest international event [ever seen in London], bringing in people from all over the world — even the G8 summit is no comparison.
“It [the Olympics] has global attention, so it is bound to attract the attention of groups that want to use it for their own purposes. That will be the case even if al-Qaeda is a distant memory.”
Clarke also warned of terrorists trying to infiltrate construction firms and said it was likely that all employees would have to be “screened” to guard against security breaches.
“Just as the security services try to infiltrate terrorist groups, so terrorist groups try to infiltrate construction firms and contract bodies,” he said.
“Al-Qaeda-related terrorists have learned to get on the inside so they can find out what is going on. One of the things the security services will start to think about is screening who is employed.”