'More suicide bombings coming'
2005-07-13 11:19
London - Home Secretary Charles Clarke said on Wednesday that Britain has to face the possibility that more people are prepared to carry out suicide bombings like those last week.
"I certainly think we have to organise ourselves on the basis there are other people prepared to act in this way," Clarke told BBC Radio.
In an earlier segment of the interview, Clarke referred to the suspects who carried out the attacks last Thursday on underground trains and a bus in London as suicide bombers.
The British authorities must tackle the roots of the problem by dealing with "anybody who preaches the kind of fundamentalism... which can lead four young men to blow themselves and others up on the tube on a Thursday morning," he said.
To address EU
Clarke said he would urge the European Union on Wednesday to rapidly pass and implement security laws, using the momentum from last week's London bombings.
British police believe the bombers behind last week's London attacks could be part of a broader network, he also said.
"A central hypothesis that has to be tested and investigated, is that the individuals we know about were working within a wider community," he told reporters in Brussels.
"The police work ... is obviously focusing on trying to answer for themselves the question," he said.
At least 52 people were killed and about 700 injured in the co-ordinated bombing attacks during the Thursday morning rush hour on London's underground train network and a double-decker bus.
Police believe they have identified four suspects who all lived in Britain and were killed in the blasts.
Clarke, who will address a European Parliament civil liberties commission and take part in an extraordinary meeting of EU interior ministers, said he would try to impress upon them the need to act urgently.
"My appeal to the European Parliament, will be to say: 'As parliamentarians, as democratically elected politicians, it is your job to ensure that Europe has the means of dealing with these terrorist attacks and serious organised crime," he told reporters in Brussels.
"The question of civil liberties has to be treated in a proportionate way," the British interior minister said.
"I argue that it is a fundamental civil liberty of people in Europe to be able to go to work on their transport system in the morning without being blown up and subject to terrorist attack," he said.
"Unless we succeed ... the people of Europe will say that you, the European Union, have let us down in these key areas."
Clarke's visit to Brussels comes a day after Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown made similar pleas for EU security laws to be pushed through more quickly and a crackdown on terror funding.
At least 52 people were killed and some 700 injured in the Thursday morning rush-hour bombings on three underground trains and a double-decker bus. It was the worst ever peacetime attack in Britain.
- AFP