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| Britain |
| Al-Qaeda support network behind London attacks |
| 2005-07-13 |
| Suicide attacks on London showed a level of calculation and technical know-how that strongly suggests a mastermind and support network behind the four young British bombers, security experts said on Wednesday. Police suspect four young men of Pakistani origin carried the bombs that exploded last Thursday aboard three underground trains and a bus, killing at least 52 people including themselves. "I would be surprised if this was something that was generated in someone's flat outside of London in a small Pakistani community," said former CIA official Nick Pratt, a terrorism expert at the Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Germany. "To be able to pull something like this off, to get a hold of the explosives, it strikes me as implausible that it would be just four singletons working by themselves." Police have said the bombs were made with high explosives and a French official in touch with the investigation said these were of military origin. Investigators discovered more explosives in raids on Tuesday. Three of the bombs exploded within 50 seconds of each other at 8:50 a.m. last Thursday on underground trains heading south, east and west from King's Cross station, where the four suspects were captured on security cameras just before 8:30. Security experts said whoever planned the operation had clearly calculated the power of the blasts would be magnified in narrow underground tunnels where there was no outlet for the massive energy released to dissipate. The fourth went off almost an hour later on a bus, an anomaly which remains unexplained. "Clearly there will be people behind this group and involved in this and clearly we are seeking those people," a police spokesman said. "The assumption has got to be they weren't acting alone." Pratt said the modus operandi of al Qaeda-type groups typically involved planning and logistics operatives in the background. "The way I have seen these cells work, you have a logistics cell, you've got someone who deals with transportation, you've got a security cell ... The one thing that gets uncovered is the actual operator cell, the guys that pull the bombing off." The attacks bore similarities to suspected al Qaeda bombings that killed 191 people on four rush-hour commuter trains in the Spanish capital Madrid last year, although those were not suicide blasts. Seven prime suspects in those attacks blew themselves up when cornered by police three weeks later. Spanish officials have not conclusively established who ultimately sponsored or masterminded the bombings although they suspect the possible involvement of two men, Syrian Mustafa Setmariam and Moroccan Amer Azizi, who have been linked with a string of previous attacks. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #2 Other than the death of Yazzer Imarat, that's about right. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2005-07-13 18:04 |
| #1 Some questions from a hearing-impaired kaffir. Unfortunately I was abducted by space aliens in July,2001 and just got re-deposited on planet earth this afternoon. Been listening to the radio and am wondering if I have all this right: The world is being terrorized by some guy named "U-see-I'm-a-Blood-thirsty-lunatic", who has a sidekick named, "I'm-the-main-swine-can't-you-hear-me"? These two are strict adherents of religious document called "Create-an-anus"? The pair have banded together to form an organization called "All-the-quivering-dildos" and the members refer to themselves as "misfit-jerks-in-drag"? These boys then get their kicks "Gobblin' Hogs"? Do I have all this right or is my hearing problem getting the better of me? |
| Posted by: DeafKaffir 2005-07-13 16:50 |