British police defused a car bomb in central London on Friday and said the device, made up of petrol, gas cylinders and nails, could have caused significant loss of life.
The bomb was left in a car parked outside a nightclub in the busy heart of London shortly after 1am local time, when ”hundreds” of people were in the vicinity, Peter Clarke, the head of London’s anti-terrorist police, told a news conference.
”It is obvious that if the device had detonated there could have been significant injury or loss of life,” he said.
Clarke said all lines of investigation were open, but that it was too early to speculate about who might have been responsible. Asked about possible links to a bomb found in France, Clarke said he was in contact with international partners, but gave no details.
He said he could not ignore the similarities between the latest case and an earlier plot, uncovered in 2004, in which an al-Qaeda militant had planned to detonate gas-fuelled bombs inside vehicles in London and other cities.
It might also have echoes of another recent plot to attack targets including a high-profile nightclub, Clarke said.
The bomb alert came almost two years after a series of coordinated suicide bomb attacks on London’s transport network killed 52 commuters, the first Islamist suicide bombings in Western Europe. London has frequently been on edge since.
Security services were called to investigate the suspicious vehicle, a light green Mercedes, after ambulance workers, attending an unrelated incident outside the nightclub, noticed what they thought was smoke billowing inside the car.
Explosives officers discovered ”significant quantities” of petrol, a number of gas cylinders and a large number of nails, Clarke said, and then manually defused the bomb.
Intelligence sources said they could not rule out a link to al-Qaeda, or an Islamist-minded militant organisation.
The discovery came hours after new Prime Minister Gordon Brown named a Cabinet to succeed Tony Blair’s. It posed a first major challenge for Brown’s three-day-old administration, and particularly his new Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith.
Smith chaired a meeting of the government’s top emergency committee, Cobra, on Friday.
al-Qaeda link?
”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,” Brown told reporters.
”This incident does recall the need for us to be vigilant at all times and the public to be alert.”
Security around Parliament was stepped up, with police body-searching drivers of vehicles entering the compound.
At the Wimbledon tennis tournament, being played in London, a spokesperson said: ”We will be advising our staff to be particularly vigilant.”
A security source said an al-Qaeda link could not be dismissed, noting that the threat from international Islamist terrorism was the main reason the official British threat level is placed at ”severe”, the second highest level.
”Numerically speaking, al-Qaeda is a strong possibility, but it just is too early to attribute specifically,” the source said, adding that it would be ”wrong and short-sighted” to rule out domestic options as well.
The MI5 intelligence agency said last year it believed Islamist radicals were plotting at least 30 major terrorist attacks in Britain and it was tracking about 1 600 suspects.
A large area of central London around the scene, in the normally busy and popular theatre district, remained sealed off hours after the bomb was found. Officers said it could be several more hours before the area was cleared.
Television pictures clearly showed one gas canister after it was removed from the car. It was green and labelled ”PATIO GAS”, which is readily available at hardware stores nationwide.
Office workers unable to enter their buildings to start the work day milled outside, watching the police operation.
Haymarket, between Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus, is usually thronged with Londoners and tourists, who flock there for its bars, theatres and restaurants. — Reuters