Britain faces Iraqi-style car-bombings

Five people are in custody after three unsophisticated attempts, and no fatalities.

from the July 2, 2007 edition

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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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