Police find bomb in London, open terrorism probe
British police forensics officers approach the area where police defused a bomb in central London, June 29, 2007.
Guy Dresser and Luke Baker
Published: Friday, June 29, 2007
LONDON (Reuters) - British police defused a car bomb in central London on Friday and said the device made up of gasoline, gas cylinders and nails could have caused significant loss of life, anti-terrorism authorities said.
The bomb was left in a car parked outside a nightclub in the busy heart of London shortly after 1 a.m. (midnight GMT), 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. Responding to a question 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-linked militant had planned to detonate gas-fuelled bombs inside vehicles in London and other cities.
Security services were called to investigate the 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.
The security services discovered "significant quantities" of petrol, a number of gas cylinders and a large number of nails, Clarke said, and then manually defused the bomb.
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 was to chair a meeting of the government's top emergency committee, Cobra, on Friday, Brown said.
"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.
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.
(Additional reporting by Mark Trevelyan, Adrian Croft, Michael Holden, Avril Ormsby and Katherine Baldwin)