Dust, heat slow bombing probe
2005-07-09 18:31
London - Investigators feeling debris with their fingertips laboured in hot and dusty conditions in London's underground on Saturday hunting for vital clues to who caused Britain's worst peace-time attack.
With the al-Qaeda network the focus of the country's biggest manhunt, the painstaking search has been given added urgency by the knowledge that Osama bin Laden's network often plans second strikes.
Forensic experts scoured bomb sites, where more than 50 people were killed and 700 injured in the Thursday morning rush hour, while police pored over hours of security camera footage and followed up leads provided by the public.
"This work will be slow, methodical and meticulous," Andy Trotter, deputy chief constable of the London Transport Police, said of a train blocked in a tunnel with several bodies aboard near Russell Square.
"It is extremely hot, very dusty and it is a great challenge for them to continue their work to recover the remaining bodies from the train underground," he said.
Investigators have established that the blasts - three on the underground rail system and one on a double-decker bus - were carefully co-ordinated strikes using small powerful bombs.
"It would appear now that all three bombs on the London Underground system actually exploded within seconds of each other," said Commander Brian Paddick of the London Metropolitan Police.
'It was bang, bang, bang'
"In fact, the three bombs exploded almost simultaneously," he said, and gave the exact period as 50 seconds, rather that the 26 minutes initially thought.
"It was bang, bang, bang," said Underground chief Tim O'Toole.
The devices themselves were probably small, powerful devices - not homemade - but set off with timers, a notoriously unreliable means of detonating explosives.
"All we are saying is that it is high explosives. That would tend to suggest that it is not homemade explosive," Paddick said.
"Whether it is military explosive, whether it is commercial explosive, whether it is plastic explosive we do not want to say at this stage," he said.
"Clearly there are some things that we will tell you, there are other things which are crucial to the investigation and the interrogation of people subsequently that we would not want to give out."
The fourth bomb, which ripped the roof off a Number 30 line bus diverted to the area minutes after London's entire underground system was shut down to help stranded passengers, appears to have been planted in a bag.
"The evidence we have so far found would suggest that it was a device in a bag rather than something that was strapped to the individual," said Paddick, which would tend to rule out a suicide bombing.
The bus's roof has been taken away for closer forensic study.
Two days on, no arrests have been made, no suspects identified.
To help the efforts, experts from Spain involved in last year's Madrid train bombing probe have travelled to London, and Europol has also sent specialists.
- AFP