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'Bombers probably British'
10/07/2005 12:56 - (SA)
London - The former head of Scotland Yard warned on Sunday that the London bombers were probably British and that there were many people in the country willing to take part in such atrocities.
"The terrorists at the centre of the London bombing this week will almost certainly be British born and bred, brought up here and totally aware of British life and values," Sir John Stevens said in a newspaper column.
He said he had heard suggestions the bombers, who killed at least 50 people and injured some 700 in the Thursday morning rush hour, had come from abroad.
"But that's just dangerous wishful thinking, a damaging illusion," wrote Stevens, who quit his job as Britain's most senior police official early this year, in the News of the World tabloid.
"I'm afraid there's a sufficient number of people in this country willing to be Islamic terrorists that they don't have to be drafted in from abroad," he said.
Stevens said he thought the likely suspects would be "apparently-ordinary British citizens, young men conservatively and cleanly dressed and probably with some higher education.
"Highly computer literate, they will have used the internet to research explosives, chemicals and electronics," he went on.
"They are also willing to kill without mercy - and to take a long time in their planning. They are painstaking, cautious, clever and very sophisticated."
Stevens said that unlike other organised groups like the Irish Republican Army or ETA, the Basque separatists, the bombers could be part of a "number of very loosely linked groups who all follow the Al-Qaeda ideology and who are at different levels of extremism."
"We believe that up to 3 000 British-born or British-based people have passed through Osama bin Laden's training camps over the years," he wrote.
- AFP
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