DJ FC

London Subway, Bus Blasts
Kill 37, Injure Hundreds

Bombings Fit Pattern of 2004 Attack
That Left 191 People Dead in Madrid
By MARC CHAMPION, KEITH JOHNSON and PHILIP SHISHKIN
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 7, 2005 4:19 p.m.

Near simultaneous explosions rocked at least three London subway trains and ripped apart a double-decker bus at the morning rush hour Thursday, police said, killing at least 37 people, injuring hundreds more and sending bloodied victims fleeing from debris-strewn blast sites.

The bombings -- the worst attack on London since World War II -- came just a day after an overjoyed city celebrated its successful bid to hold the 2012 Olympics.

The death toll of 37 included two in the bus attack. Earlier, police could only confirm 33 dead from the subway bombings and were unable to say how many died as a result of the bus explosion. Among the injured Among them were at least 45 people in serious or critical condition, including amputations, fractures and burns, hospital officials said.

A visibly shaken British Prime Minister Tony Blair, hosting the Group of Eight leaders in Scotland, declared London had suffered "a series of terrorist attacks" -- clearly timed to coincide with the summit -- and called it "barbaric."

"Those responsible have no respect for human life. We are united in our resolve to confront and defeat this terrorism that is not an attack on one nation but on all nations and on civilized people everywhere," said Mr. Blair, flanked by G-8 leaders, as he read a statement before departing for London.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the explosions have the "hallmarks of an al Qaeda related attack. He added that neither Britain's police nor the intelligence services had any warning of the attacks.

Officials shut down London's entire bus and subway transport network.

The deadly bombings fit the pattern of those that killed 191 people in Madrid last year, with a coordinated series of explosions targeted at rush-hour commuters and timed to a major political event, terrorism experts said. In Madrid, that event was national elections, while Thursday's attack in London coincided with a summit meeting of some of the world's most powerful leaders in Scotland. "This attack ticks all the same boxes" as Madrid, said Andrew Garfield, terrorism expert at Kings College London.

The U.N. Security Council passed a resolution condemning the attacks. The resolution, passed 15-0, expressed the council's sympathy for the victims and urged all nations to help bring those responsible to justice and expresses the council's determination to combat terrorism. It was drawn up by Britain. "This meeting of the council is very important to the United Kingdom," Britain's U.N. Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry said before walking into the council chambers.

Focus on the G-8

The attack came as the Live 8 series of rock concerts has focused widespread public attention on the G-8 summit far beyond the usual, and as Mr. Blair has just assumed the presidency of the European Union.


Mr. Blair tried to use the G-8 event to highlight the barbarity of the attacks. "Here at this summit world leaders are striving to combat world poverty and improve human lives. The terrorists are intent on destroying human lives," Mr. Blair said in a joint statement with the other heads of state as they stood behind him to offer their symbolic report. "We shall prevail, they shall not."

Mr. Blair left for London to chair an emergency meeting on the bombings shortly after that statement. But he said he planned to return to Scotland in the evening and would not allow the summit to be disrupted. But G-8 communiques on the world economy and climate change expected Thursday were postponed until Friday.

London Metropolitan Police spokesman Brian Paddick said that four explosions occurred between 8:51 a.m. and 9:47 a.m. local time. Three were on London's Underground system, while a fourth ripped through a double-decker bus as people being evacuated from the subway poured onto buses. The roof of the bus was blown off. Mr. Paddick said seven people died in the first train explosion at Aldgate in London's financial district; 21 died in an 8:56 a.m. explosion on a train between Kings Cross and Russell Square; and another seven died in a 9:17 a.m. explosion on a train at Edgware Road, a little further west. Mr. Paddick said there were fatalities on the bus, which was hit at 9:47 a.m., but he could not confirm the number.


It was not clear who was responsible for the attacks. But Mr. Garfield and other experts said the attacks bore the hallmarks of an al Qaeda event. The U.K. was subjected to terrorist bomb attacks by the IRA for 20 years and the peace process in Northern Ireland has recently run into trouble. But IRA attacks were on a smaller scale and the last on the British mainland was in 1996.

Britain has been widely considered high on the list of al Qaeda targets since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. Under Mr. Blair, Britain has backed the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and its military still controls Iraq's Southern sector.

Last year, Sir John Stevens, London's former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, warned that an Islamist extremist attack in London was "inevitable." The government estimates that between 10,000 and 15,000 British Muslims are supporters of al Qaeda or related groups, although it says only a fraction of those are considered active threats to security. The government also believes that between 300 and 600 British citizens were trained in al Qaeda and Taliban military camps in Afghanistan.

In December 2001, Mr. Blair introduced a draconian law enabling the state to arrest immigrants suspected of posing a security threat and to jail them indefinitely without trial if they choose not to be sent home. That law proved highly controversial and eventually was ruled illegal in a court case last December. The 10 men still held under the law, all Muslims, were released on bail in March. Mr. Blair replaced the law with one allowing the government to keep the suspects under a strict regime of isolation and house arrest, again drawing fire from civil libertarians and the European Commission.

Intelligence Debate

The bombings are certain to launch a debate about the effectiveness of MI5, Britain's domestic spying service, in combating Islamic terrorism. Until now, MI5 was considered relatively successful in detecting and thwarting attempted attacks – of which two have been publicly documented. MI5's use of wiretaps and surveillance to monitor suspects and gather intelligence about planned attacks before making arrests and rolling up terrorist cells was examined as a possible model for the U.S. by Congress last year. The last successful attack on British soil by an Islamic militant group was the bombing of the Israeli embassy in London in 1994.

In January 2003, U.K. police raided an apartment above a pharmacy in North London, where they found traces of the deadly poison ricin and equipment used in making it. Ten arrests of Algerian nationals followed.

In March 2004, MI5 cracked an alleged plot to make a large bomb near London's Heathrow airport, one of the world's busiest. Police arrested eight Pakistani men and charged them with obtaining half a ton of ammonium-nitrate fertilize, hiding it in a self-storage locker near Heathrow Airport. MI5 officers secretly entered the locker and chemically neutralized the fertilizer so that it wouldn't work in a bomb. This let investigators continue surveillance of the group, without risk that the material could be used in an attack.

"If you move too early, you don't get the information you need to prevent attacks," Mr. Garfield said. But the approach also involves risks. "The question is whether this group was one that MI5 just didn't know about, or whether it was under surveillance but they just didn't get the intelligence in time," Mr. Garfield said.

In any case, the U.K. authorities have also become more pre-emptive in rounding up suspects since 9/11. One possible result has been a series of failed court prosecutions. In the ricin case, for example, all but one of the suspects were acquitted at trial. The only convinction was the murder of a police officer during the original arrest.

Many radicals arrested in Europe in recent years have had ties to people in the U.K. But Britain is not part of the Schengen bloc of countries that allow passport-free travel across borders, making it more difficult for cells to establish operational contact with other countries. Instead, investigators say, the U.K. is more important because of its leading role as an ideological hub for violent strains of Islam that promote holy war.

"The U.K. might be the world's biggest hotbed of radical Islamic thought," said Gustavo de Aristegui, a Spanish member of Parliament and former Interior Ministry official who studies radical Islam.

One of the leading proponents of radical Islam in Britain, Abu Hamza al-Masri, went on trial earlier this week, charged with inciting the murder of non-Muslims. Mr. Hamza, who until last October preached at the Finsbury Park Mosque in North London, is a veteran of the Afghan jihad against the Soviets and has preached violent jihad for years. Two of his followers were later arrested: the shoe-bomber Richard Reid, who attempted to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami in December 2001, and alleged Sept. 11 plotter Zacharias Moussaoui. Mr. Hamza was also linked, investigators say, to Djamel Beghal, who was arrested after plotting to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Paris in 2002. Mr. Hamza, who could face life in prison, denies any connection to violence and says he is innocent.

Terrorism experts say Mr. Hamza's trial may have triggered a violent reaction from radical Muslims. In Spain and other countries, police crackdowns on suspected terrorists have been followed by the creation of new cells and in some cases attempted attacks.

London is also the home of Omar Mahmoud Abu Omar, better known as Abu Qatada, a radical Muslim cleric with links to suspected terrorists throughout Europe. Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish investigating magistrate, describes him as the spiritual head of al Qaeda in Europe, and is seeking his extradition. According to Spanish court papers, Abu Qatada had links with a number of suspected radicals in Spain who were on trial this summer for their role in planning the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Qatada was placed under house arrest in 2002 and later arrested. He is one of the 10 men who were released in March.


In France and Spain, the governments have tried to strengthen mainstream Muslim groups to freeze out radical strains. In France, the government has created a Muslim council to represent practicing Muslims. A Spanish Muslim organization issued the first fatwa, or religious edict, condemning Osama bin Laden last year. In the Netherlands, security officials shut down a series of radical websites after the murder of filmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim radical last year. In Italy, officials zeroed in on the Islamic Cultural Center of Milan, which had been a nexus of radical activity from the early 1990s and sent recruits to fight in the Iraqi insurgency.

A posting on an Islamic Web site said that the so-called Secret Organization of al Qaeda in Europe perpetrated Thursday's bombings in London in retaliation for the U.K.'s military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the statement is deemed by experts of dubious credibility.

Cross-Border Cooperation

The attacks are likely to spur pan-European efforts to improve cross-border cooperation among a smattering of law-enforcement agencies dealing with counterterrorism. By one count, there are 34 such agencies across the European Union.

The coordination efforts, first triggered by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S., picked up in earnest after the Madrid train bombings last year. But law-enforcement officials say progress has been very slow, despite the EU's decision to create a new post of counterterrorism coordinator and to give more powers to Europol, an agency that coordinates law-enforcement across Europe.

The London attacks "will raise the awareness of terrorism in Europe," says Cyrille Fijnaut, a professor of international criminal law at the University of Leuven in Belgium. "The feeling was that it was an American problem. It changed to some extent after Madrid, but now people will understand even more that Europe is vulnerable."

Among European law-enforcement officials, London always had a reputation as a city with one of the most experienced police forces to deal with terrorism, so a successful attack in London means no European city is safe, Mr. Fijnaut says.

The gaps in cross-border collaboration in the EU mean that crucial links among different terror cells can slip through the cracks. "Even very innocent missing links can have a fatal, large-scale impact," Mr. Fijnaut says. "If you have a very complicated European system, the risk of these missing links is quite great."

On Thursday, the European Commission, the EU's executive branch, said it will propose a new "rapid response mechanism" to enable the 25-nation bloc "to respond more efficiently and in a coordinated way to terrorist attacks," said Franco Frattini, the EU's security and justice commissioner. The proposal would add to a raft of similar EU measures enacted over the past few years, ranging from a pan-European arrest warrant to the creation of a counterterrorism task force at Europol.

--The Associated Press contributed to this article.