4-Bomb Plot Puts London Back on Edge

Would-be bombers targeted three Underground trains and a red double-decker bus Thursday in a coordinated attack seemingly designed to mirror blasts two weeks ago that killed 56 people. The attacks unnerved Londoners, but caused no serious casualties and little damage.

Witnesses said bombs concealed in backpacks made loud popping sounds and emitted a strong acrid smell but failed to fully detonate. In the panic and confusion that ensued, all four attackers fled.

The attacks came two weeks to the day after the July 7 bombings and seemed intended to duplicate them. Besides involving backpack bombs, they were nearly simultaneous, and the targets again were three subways and a double-decker bus distributed roughly in a cross pattern centered on the heart of London. That configuration could evoke the “flaming cross” described in a claim of responsibility on an extremist Islamic website after the first attacks.

It was unclear why the devices failed to explode fully and whether the bombing attempts were a copycat attack or part of a conspiracy to stage a terrorist campaign in London. Anti-terrorism officials in Europe had been on guard for follow-up strikes, which are a signature of Islamic terrorist groups allied with or inspired by the Al Qaeda network.

Security officials speculated that the explosives used Thursday might have been too old to work properly or that the bomb maker made a mistake while assembling them.

Authorities said the failed attempts at the Shepherd’s Bush Station in West London, the Warren Street Station in central London and the Oval Station south of the River Thames could help the investigation because the remains of the bombs and the bags that concealed them provided valuable physical evidence. Closed-circuit television images might also shed light on the individuals or group that has targeted London’s commuters.

“I feel very positive about some of these developments,” Metropolitan Police Chief Ian Blair said after the midday bombing attempts that closed down additional sections of Underground lines and left thousands of people stranded in central London, fighting for taxis or scarce space on the buses still operating. “Clearly, the intention must have been to kill.... The important thing is that the intention has not been fulfilled.

“From what I understand, some of the devices remained unexploded, if I can describe it that way,” Blair said. “The explosives officers and the forensics and everybody else is going to take their time to examine all of this.... We are just going to have to be patient.”

Police launched a massive manhunt, in one instance sending a score of heavily armed officers to scour a hospital room by room. Authorities said late Thursday that two people had been held for questioning, but it was unclear whether they were suspected of involvement in the attempted bombings.

First reports of the incidents came about 12:30 p.m., as another in a series of memorial events for the July 7 victims was scheduled to take place.

The affected Tube lines were quickly closed down and the stations were evacuated, and police put up cordons covering several blocks.

Prime Minister Tony Blair called an emergency meeting of the Cobra group, the council of his top security officials.

Passengers on the targeted trains and bus described moments of terror.

“I was sitting on the Tube not paying much attention to anything and I heard a pop, like a really big balloon had burst, then I saw a little smoke,” passenger Kate Reid told the BBC. “I saw a bag on the floor next to a young man who looked really scared. We pulled into the Oval Station, and he just sprinted away as soon as the doors opened.”

Outside Warren Street Station, passenger Sufiane Mohellavi of France said he was in the middle car of a Victoria Line subway train when he suddenly smelled something burning, like an electrical fire. He said he did not see smoke or hear an explosion, but there was a “truly terrible odor.”

“When I was in the train it was agonizing,” Mohellavi said. “I wanted to jump, get out of the carriage, break a window and jump out. There was no way to go.”

As the train pulled into the station, panicked passengers raced for the doors. He held up shoes and slippers that passengers left behind in the rout. “All I could think about is when am I going to get out,” he said.

Sirens sounded throughout the city.

“Police came in at 12:30 to tell people to evacuate the office because of a security alert, and so we left the office,” said Rebecca Hamilton, 34, who works at a music studio situated directly under the elevated line at Shepherd’s Bush. “They ran in and told us to get out.”

A small explosion aboard a No. 26 bus in Hackney, in East London, blew out a window on the upper deck, but no passengers were injured. Police kept spectators away as bomb experts focused their attention on a suspicious piece of baggage.

“We were told to evacuate the area, and I felt pretty scared. It has never happened to me before,” said Patrick Harris, 24, a real estate agent.

Mayor Ken Livingstone said he was not surprised that there had been another bombing attempt.

“Those people whose memories stretch back to the terrorist campaigns in the ‘70s and ‘80s and early ‘90s will remember there were very often horrifying bombings in London often only weeks apart,” he said. “And we got through that. And we’ll get through this.”

In recent years, foiled plotters have envisioned such attacks as the opening salvos of sustained offensives intended to create maximum psychological terror, officials say, even if they didn’t aspire to creating the massive destruction or high death toll of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

Suicide bombers in Istanbul hit the British Consulate and a London-based bank there in 2003 only five days after a bombing at a synagogue in the Turkish city. As in London on Thursday, the Istanbul follow-up strikes were particularly audacious because Turkish security forces were conducting a nationwide search for suspected terrorists.

In other cases, police were able to foil follow-up attacks. In last year’s Madrid train bombings, a predominantly North African cell had stockpiled explosives, weapons and money for new strikes. Would-be attackers planted a bomb beneath the tracks of a high-speed train, but the device was discovered, and they blew themselves up days later when police trapped them in a house.

In Amsterdam in November, Dutch police hunting for clues in the killing of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh arrested suspects who were allegedly planning to assassinate several political figures, including a legislator who was a close associate of Van Gogh.

The July 7 attacks in London have been blamed on four suicide bombers, three Britons of Pakistani descent and a Jamaican-born British citizen who converted to radical Islam.

If surviving members of the same network attempted a follow-up attack, their bombs might have malfunctioned because they contained the same explosive prepared for the first attacks, experts said. U.S. and European law enforcement officials have said it appears that triacetone peroxide, or TATP, was used in the first blasts, and that explosive mix is volatile and deteriorates with time.

“With these home-grown explosives, it could have gotten old on them,” a U.S. law enforcement official said.

After the July 7 attacks, police found unexploded bombs in the trunk of a car apparently left by the bombers at a train station in Luton, north of London, and in a house in the northern city of Leeds that police have characterized as the “bomb factory.”

Because the devices were probably assembled by the same person, it’s also possible that the bomb maker made a fundamental error, experts said.

“Starting from the premise that the four bombs were assembled by the same expert from the same stock of explosives, it’s very imaginable that the same error was repeated in the assembly of each device or that in fact the explosive was of bad quality,” said Claude Moniquet of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center, a Brussels think tank.

The remains of the failed bombs should provide a wealth of forensic evidence and could produce “real progress” in the investigation, Moniquet said. In the Madrid case, an unexploded backpack bomb became a vital clue in the case.

There was little new information Thursday about the status of Haroon Rashid Aswat, a British Muslim of Indian descent reportedly sought by British investigators because of phone links to the July 7 bombers. Sources told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday that he was under arrest in Pakistan, but Pakistani authorities Thursday remained silent on his status.

Ordinarily, the Pakistanis would convey information about the arrest of a potentially significant suspect to U.S. agencies, but that has not happened in this case, an American official said Thursday. As a result, the U.S. official said, it remains unclear whether Aswat had been detained.

But a senior European police official, who has worked on the London bombings and a previous case that may be connected to them, said his agency had been informed that Aswat had been arrested in Pakistan and that he was suspected of acting as a coordinator for the plotters, perhaps traveling between Pakistan and Britain.

European and U.S. officials both described Aswat as an operative with ties to Al Qaeda and to a case that may have foreshadowed the London bombings: a foiled suspected plot last year in which U.S. intelligence intercepts helped British police arrest members of a Pakistani British cell that had stockpiled half a ton of suspected bomb-making materials.

That investigation uncovered links between the dismantled cell and at least one of the July 7 bombers, Mohamed Sidique Khan, said U.S. and European officials. But Khan was not arrested at the time.

“We know that [Aswat is] bad news and he’s got Al Qaeda connections,” the U.S. official said. Nonetheless, the official added, it was premature to describe him as a mastermind of the July 7 plot.

The FBI has confirmed that Aswat was involved in a case in which he allegedly served as an operative of London cleric Abu Hamza al Masri, who explored setting up terrorist training camps with extremists in Oregon, the U.S. official said.

Abu Hamza now faces trial in both the U.S. and Britain. Aswat was not charged in that case, but he allegedly traveled to Oregon as Abu Hamza’s emissary to extremists there.

Times staff writer Greg Miller in Washington contributed to this report.