Police defused a car bomb packed with petrol, gas and nails outside a busy nightclub in the heart of London on Friday, foiling an attack that echoed an earlier al-Qaeda plot and could have killed or wounded scores of people.
Possible bomb components were found in a second car hours later, police said on Friday evening.
The second vehicle had been towed from Trafalgar Square to Park Lane overnight because it was illegally parked, CNN reported sources as saying. At the Park Lane garage, workers became suspicious after news of the first incident, because the car smelled of gas, CNN said.
Police said the second car was found to contain components similar to those in the first car — definitely fuel, and possibly more. They said the car was of grave concern, and could potentially be a second car bomb.
Police also sealed off another central London street, Fleet Street, to investigate a suspicious vehicle. By evening, police had lifted the alert at Fleet Street.
The first bomb was found in a green Mercedes parked outside the cavernous Tiger Tiger nightclub, one of London’s biggest discos, shortly after 1am local time, when hundreds were packed inside for ”Sugar ‘n Spice Ladies’ Night” and milling about outside.
The police, alerted by ambulance workers who thought they saw smoke inside the car, defused the bomb.
Authorities said they did not know who left the bomb, but they had begun a counter-terrorism investigation. The alerts came less than two years after Islamist suicide bombers killed 52 commuters on London transport.
”It is obvious that if the device had detonated, there could have been significant injury or loss of life,” said Peter Clarke, the head of London’s anti-terrorist police.
He said there were similarities between Friday’s incident and an earlier plot, uncovered in 2004, in which an al-Qaeda militant planned to detonate gas-fuelled bombs in limousines.
The ringleader of that plot, Dhiren Barot, was convicted last year. Another group of Islamic radicals was convicted this year in a plot targeting a big nightclub and other sites. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, facing a major challenge two days after succeeding Tony Blair, convened Britain’s top security committee, Cobra.
”We are currently facing the most serious and sustained threat to our security from international terrorism,” Jacqui Smith, Brown’s new Interior Minister, said after the meeting, which she chaired in her first day on the job.
A large area around the scene on central London’s Haymarket street remained sealed off throughout the day. Television pictures showed a gas canister after it had been removed from the car. It was green and labelled ”Patio Gas”, which is readily available at hardware stores in Britain.
Al-Qaeda link?
Explosives officers also found ”significant quantities” of petrol and a large number of nails in the car, Clarke said. Sky News said the device was rigged to detonate with a cellphone trigger, but police would not confirm that report.
Britain has experienced an increase in terrorism-related threats since the September 11 attacks on the United States and since it joined forces with US troops to invade Iraq in 2003, an event that provoked widespread domestic criticism.
Brown has pledged to respect Britain’s commitments in Iraq, although there has been speculation he may accelerate the British troop withdrawal.
Intelligence sources said they could not rule out an al-Qaeda link to the car bomb, adding the danger of international Islamist terrorism is the main reason Britain’s threat level is placed at ”severe”, the second-highest rating.
”We’re following up lots of leads and hopefully making some progress, but we’re still keeping quite an open mind,” a security source said. ”The balance of probability does lie pretty strongly with international terrorism,” the official said, referring to al-Qaeda-inspired radical Islamism.
Brown said the incident showed the need for vigilance.
”The first duty of a government is the security of the people and as the police and security services have said on so many occasions, we face a serious and continued security threat to our country,” he told reporters.
Security around Parliament was stepped up, with police body-searching the drivers of cars entering the compound. Across town, security was tightened at the Wimbledon tennis championship. — Reuters
Additional reporting by Peter Graff, Avril Ormsby, Mark Trevelyan, Guy Dresser, Adrian Croft, Katherine Baldwin and Paul Majendie