Britain faces Iraqi-style car-bombings

Some say the security services have been coming to grips with the threat, particularly since the 7/7 attack. Peter Neumann, a terrorism expert at King's College London says that the degree of desperation in the weekend attacks could be seen as a sign that the authorities were gaining the upper hand over terrorists.

Two weeks ago, seven men were found guilty of involvement in an Al Qaeda-linked plan that, among other things, intended to use a limousine filled with gas canisters as a car bomb. In the only other successful mass prosecution of Islamic militants in Britain, a group was convicted in April of planning a series of attacks on a nightclub, shopping center and gas network. [Editor's note: The original version mischaracterized the prosecution of terrorists in Britain.]

This past weekend's car bomb attacks, for example, did not appear to have been planned or executed with the same sophistication as 7/7, or the other plots that British authorities say they have recently disrupted.

"The fact that they were trying to attack the terminal building is an indication that it has become harder to get on the plane and disrupt the actual traffic," Mr. Neumann says.

But Neumann adds that there were several worries for the security services: the attacks apparently came with no prior intelligence, one of the London cars was spotted by an ambulance crew that noticed smoke coming from a car, and the Scotland attack was apparently unexpected in that it was assumed terrorists were only interested in London targets.

Mr. Ayers agreed that the fact that no one was killed should not be interpreted as a success for Britain's counter-terrorist effort. "Let's not credit the security services for Friday night's attack; let's not credit them for the Glasgow attacks," he says. "They were failures as a result of incompetence" on the part of the perpetrators.

Lord Stevens, a former police chief appointed last week to the new post of adviser on international security issues, wrote in a newspaper column: "It is a sign of the new maturity and sophistication of Al Qaeda in Britain that they have moved to this car bomb-style campaign. "Make no mistake, this weekend's bomb attacks signal a major escalation in the war being waged on us by Islamic terrorists."

MJ Gohel, another London-based security expert, says that car bombs are easier to make than the fertiliser bombs and other explosive devices used in previous British attacks and plots.

"The materials are easily obtained [and] available in the open market. The method is described on the Internet, and it doesn't require high level sophistication," he says. "But these vehicles are lethal weapons of mass destruction," he says, adding that hundreds could have died in London or Glasgow if the weapons had worked as they were intended to.

That they didn't was probably due to the amateurish execution. Lord Stevens drew parallels with car bombings in Iraq and Bali, but the British versions were a poor imitation. The cars used a combination of nails, gasoline, and gas canisters, and none detonated.

Bombs in Iraq, by contrast, typically use high explosives, such as C4 or explosives scavenged from old Iraqi weapons depots. The first Bali attack, in 2002, used about 200 pounds of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer, to make a bomb similar to the one that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, while the second Bali bomb was reported to have used TNT.

Yet defending against car bombs will prove taxing, Mr. Gohel adds. "The police can't stop and search every vehicle [entering London]. "

Dan Murphy contributed from Cairo.

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