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Dublin July 14, 2005 (Irish Examiner) — THE BALKANS were last night being named as the possible source of the explosive material used in the London bombings.
French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy told the emergency meeting of EU justice ministers in Brussels, that there was strong suspicion the explosives used in the bombings came from the Balkans or Eastern Europe, where it is possible to buy the material on the black market after the Balkan wars.
However, British Home Secretary Charles Clarke said he was bewildered by the comments.
USS Cole – attack with C4 explosives
More below the fold »»
Traces of military plastic explosive, more deadly and efficient than commercial varieties is understood to have been found in the debris of the wrecked Underground carriages and the bus.
Scotland Yard has asked its counterparts around Europe to check stockpiles at military bases and building sites for missing explosives. Military explosive is hard to detect even by trained sniffer dogs, easy to hide, and stable if smuggled across a European border and then into Britain in a container.
Superintendent Christophe Chaboud, head of the French security service’s Anti-terrorist Co-ordination Unit, said: “The use of military explosives is very worrying. We are more used to seeing home-made explosives, made from chemicals. How did they procure them? Either they were supplied by the underground market, for example from the Balkans, or they benefited from accomplices who removed explosives from a military base.”
After intensive efforts, availability of Semtex [1] used extensively by the Provisional IRA, has dried up. However, there are a number of alternatives, notably C4, which comes in sticks and can be moulded into a shape suitable for a bomb. C4 is a high-quality plastic explosive that has been used by al-Qaida-affiliated terrorists in other attacks.
The explosive is manufactured mainly in the US but there is evidence that military explosives have been bought by terrorist groups from sources in Croatia and elsewhere in the Balkans. Islamic militants are reported to have obtained military explosives from Belgrade in recent years.
[1] Semtex It is generally believed that the IRA still has at least 2.5 tonnes of Semtex with a shelf life of perhaps another 20 years.
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The Guardian – Some Passengers Used Their Mobile Phones
Eyewitness account – July 8, 2005 – Circle line, Liverpool Street – Aldgate.
“We tried to open the doors but the doors were fixed shut and the ash was settling everywhere,” said Loyita Worley, 49, who had also been travelling in the third carriage.
As some passengers used their mobile phones to let loved ones know they were alive, some of the walking wounded were moving into less damaged carriages through connecting doors to get away from the smoke. “There was blood dripping off them, they were all white,” Ms Worley said.
Odd – It is impossible to use mobile phones in the tunnels.
According to eyewitnesses and police, the device appears to have been placed somewhere near the back of the bus’s top deck. Raj Mattoo, 35, who works at the charity Scope, said: “As I looked at the bus I saw it explode. The explosion was at the back. It ripped off the roof that was thrown 10 metres in the air …”
“There was what seemed like a muffled bang and a huge plume of smoke,” said Neil Courtis, 34, a financial journalist. “I went towards the blast and saw a woman with her left leg blown off. She looked in a bad way. I could smell cordite.”
The airliner crashed between two and three hundred feet from my office in the Pentagon, just around a corner from where I work. … I walked to my office, shut down my computer, and headed out. Even before stepping outside I could smell the cordite. Then I knew explosives had been set off somewhere.
A personnel attorney at the Pentagon, Goldsmith was riding a shuttle bus to work on Tuesday, Sept. 11, when she learned of the attack on the World Trade Center. … “We saw a huge black cloud of smoke,” she said, saying it smelled like cordite or gun smoke.
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NEW YORK July 18, 2005 (Reuters) – Britain’s top intelligence and law enforcement officials concluded less than a month before the London bombings that there was no group with current intent and the capability to attack the U.K., the New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing a confidential intelligence report.
The Times said authorities made their conclusion in the wake of a terror threat assessment by the Joint Terrorist Analysis Center, which includes officials from Britain’s top intelligence agencies, as well as Customs and the Metropolitan Police.
The assessment, according to the newspaper, prompted the British government to lower its formal threat assessment one level, from “severe defined” to “substantial.” Asked to comment on the document, a senior British official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said according to the newspaper, “We do not discuss intelligence assessments.”
CAIRO July 19, 2005 (Reuters) — British authorities are sure that an Egyptian biochemist being questioned in Egypt had no role in the London bombings, a state-owned Egyptian newspaper said today, quoting a senior security official.
“There is complete security cooperation with the British side, which is convinced from the questioning carried out by Egypt, that Elnashar had no role in these explosions,” al-Ahram newspaper quoted the security source as saying.
Chemist Has ‘No Links’ With Al Qaeda
Egyptian biochemist Magdy Mahmoud el-Nashar
LUTON, England July 18, 2005 (AFP) — In a Muslim district of Luton, where the four suspected London bombers met on the morning of July 7, all agreed the attacks were wrong, but were quick to point to the Iraq war as an explanation for them. Muslims, most of them originally from Bangladesh and Pakistan, make up 14.5 percent of Luton’s 180,000 inhabitants.
Although few people in the neighbourhood voiced extreme views, all had harsh words for US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
“Bush and Blair, they are not caring about the people in Iraq, about the innocent people getting killed,” said Abdul Mohammed, 45, a Sunni Muslim from Bangladesh who settled in Britain 29 years ago. He felt his religion to be under attack by Western powers. “Since the last 10 years, they are trying to control everything all over the world … Islam is attacked: in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Palestine,” argued the father of four.
UK Ministers reject Iraq terror link
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Diaries/Comments @dKos by new creve coeur
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Indicating where the official investigation stands and in which direction it is pointing.
Early evidence was found too easily, the identification of the four Britons with backpack and the contaminated bathtub of Egyptian chemistry student Magdy Elnashar, simply arrested while on vacation visiting family in Cairo – Egypt
Cairo – Egypt Info US Embassy
It’s all too convenient, without the clear evidence in background and historical links to extreme Muslim fundamentalism.
But if Germaine brought all the explosives, that would mean he is more closely tied to whoever manufactured the explosives. Indeed all the reports I’ve seen connect the explosives to the Fiat that Lindsey drove rather than the Micra with the three other men.
Request for Facts & Status of Forensics
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especially clarity on evidence of explosives, this is crucial in determining mastermind and planner of London attack.
USA WELCOME: Make Yourself Known @BooMan Tribune and add some cheers!
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By Craig Whitlock and Kamran Khan :: Washington Post
7/19/2005 LONDON – One of the suspected London transit bombers visited Israel for a day in the spring of 2003, Israeli authorities have reported as part of an international effort to re-create the travels of the four men who investigators believe set off the July 7 explosions.
Mohammed Sidique Khan arrived in Tel Aviv and left the next day, senior Israeli intelligence officials have told Israeli reporters. Investigators say they have found no evidence that his trip was related to the subsequent April 30, 2003, suicide attack on a Tel Aviv cafe by two British men of Pakistani origin.
The purpose of Khan’s trip to Israel is one of the many unknowns in the 10-day-old investigation.
Several weeks after his visit, a British-born man of Pakistani descent, Asif Hanif, blew himself up at Mike’s Place, a Tel Aviv nightspot, killing three other people. Two weeks later, the body of another British citizen, Omar Sharif, who investigators said fled the bar after a bomb he was carrying failed to detonate, was found in the sea off Tel Aviv.
Avi Tabib – Hero of Mike’s Place
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New details emerged Monday on trips that three of the four suspects made to Pakistan before the attacks. Khan and Shehzad Tanweer arrived in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, on Nov. 16 last year on the same Turkish Airlines flight, then flew home together Feb. 7, Pakistani investigators said after reviewing immigration records.
A third suspect, Husib Mir Hussain, flew into Karachi on July 15, 2004, on a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight from Riyadh, records show. Pakistani officials said they did not know how long Hussain stayed, his family in Leeds told British investigators that he was gone for about four months.
USA WELCOME: Make Yourself Known @BooMan Tribune and add some cheers!
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“According to a confidential report produced the day after the bombing by a private London security firm, Aegis Defense Services, Ltd., which was seen and read by Pentagon officials, the team was probably four to six strong . . . The Aegis report says it is possible that the explosives were ‘constructed by an experienced bomb maker, possibly coming to the U.K. for that very purpose.'”
Aegis and its chief Tim Spicer are intimately involved with the Pentagon’s Iraq operations. Spicer is also implicated for murders in Northern Ireland in the 1990s. Aegis is also tied to the sponsoring of an aborted coup in the West African nation of Equatorial Guinea, which resulted in the arrest of Sir Mark Thatcher, son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Tim Spicer involved in civil wars
Sierra Leone and Papua New Guinea.
How did Aegis conclude that the foreign origin for the bomb maker, when no such evidence was available? What role does this British security firm serve in helping drive Washington-London “war on terrorism” planning, and what was this confidential report “seen and read by Pentagon officials”?
On-Line Journal – Analysis London Bombing July 18, 2005
[Article has been edited with additional links – Ed]
ICTS – International Consultants on Targeted Security – founded by a select group of security experts, former military commanding officers and veterans of government intelligence and security agencies has been a world leader in aviation security and security solutions since it was founded in 1982. Company affiliates can be found in the United States, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Within Europe, subsidiaries operate from 40 locations including Paris, London, Rome and Amsterdam, employing over 10,000 people.
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Atzmon and his business partner Ezra Harel are the majority owners (57%) of ICTS–International Consultants on Targeted Security, run by “former [Israeli] military commanding officers and veterans of government intelligence and security agencies” according its Web site. In 1999, Atzmon’s Netherlands-based firm took over management of security at Logan Airport in Boston, Massachusetts, through ICTS’ subsidiary Huntleigh USA.
Israeli plutocrat Menachem Atzmon was co-treasurer of the Likud, along with Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, during and after the 1988 Israeli elections. In August 1988, Atzmon worked with Olmert and two other men to collect illegal contributions for the Likud from corporations, against Israel’s party funding law, by providing fictitious advertising services to the contributors. Atzmon was later convicted in that campaign finance fraud, while Olmert was acquitted.
This convicted Likud criminal’s firm was in charge of security at Logan Airport–inspecting the validity of passports and visas, searching cargo, screening passengers–when two airliners were hijacked from there on Sept. 11, 2001, and demolished the World Trade Center towers in New York.
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This is beginning to look–like 9/11–like an inside job.
A nice touch is the use of cell phones–according to official reports–in a situation in which they do not work. This is also like 9/11, with its phony story of the cell-phone calls made from the plane that went down over Pennsylvania.
This reminds me of the terrorist “communiques” written by Muslims ignorant of Arabic . . .
I think we are beginning to see a pattern here.
It is clear the Bush administration should have known about the 9/11 attacks and that the Blair government should have known about the 7/7 attacks. But I have not seen enough evidence that these attacks were inside jobs.
The fake phone conversations are proof that the government lied and created fake evidence. However, you might be tempted to think this was an after-the-fact CYA activity by otherwise innocent parties.
It wasn’t, but I will leave that hanging, for the real proof that the job was inside comes from elsewhere:
Look at the collapse of WTC 7. Unlike WTC 1 & 2, WTC 7 had no exotic architectural design, it was a straigtforward basic skyscraper. It was not struck by either aircraft, but was apparently struck by falling debris. Fires were seen to have started on two floors. Like all skyscrapers, the structure itself was fireproof: Presumably what was burning were office furnishings. Under such conditions, skyscrapers normally do not collapse.
But let’s forget about “normally,” and look at the impossible thing: WTC 7 did not merely collapse, but collapsed into its own footprint. There is one known way to accomplish that: It is called controlled demolition.
This means that explosives were planted extensively and carefully in WTC 7 before the 9/11 attacks, in preparation for the attacks, by people skilled in controlled demolition who had access to detailed information of the building structure and access to building security.
This means the demolition team was aware of the plans of the 9/11 attackers, or were the same people.
Who these people are is the proper subject for a criminal investigation, which, oddly enough, after nearly four years, has never happened.
That the scope of suspects does indeed include the highest levels of government, is shown by other aspects of 9/11, such as the delay in identifying the aircraft as hijacked, even after they deviated from their flight paths and their transponders were turned off, the delay in NORAD taking action on the hijackings after being informed, and the scrambling of interceptor jets from the wrong airbases–that is from bases far from the hijacked aircraft rather than nearer ones. The problem of the timeline, as it is called, is one of the first things that was noticed and there is quite a bit of information up on the web about it.
The timeline suggests government complicity.
But the collapse of WTC 7 proves inside involvement in planning and implementation.
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I am not prepared to say the 7/7 attack in London was done by the government. But I admit it is a possibility I am wondering about.
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by Tony Blair, George Bush and Dick Cheney.
It’s not difficult to allow some leeway on your comment.
From London investigation after 16 days, little hard evidence is coming forward, contrary to the Madrid investigation. Makes me wonder …
Blair has a track record on white wash investigations the last few years.
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of that British intelligence officer. Went out to the woods and slit his wrists–possibly in the correct, not the incorrect manner–and died. A suicide. Only, there was no blood. Where did the blood go? Even if he had been careful to bleed into a catch basin, where did the catch basin go?
This all seems like ages ago now, but it was all part of the pre-Iraqi War WMD lies.
I am wondering how we ever managed to think of Blair as liberal.
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From The Guardian link –
What started out as a fairly ‘straightforward’ investigation of Aegis Defence Services, a small PMC with connections, tailspinned into a global spider’s web of corporate and government connections that (so far) spans countries from South/North America, Africa, the Middle and Far East. A multitude of players including government leaders from Burma to Uganda with stopovers in South Africa, DR Congo, Sierra Leone, Papua New Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Zambia, Mozambique, Angola, then on to Venezuela, Guyana, Colombia and the United States.
Tim Spicer is an ex-soldier from the Scots Guards, an elite unit of the British Army, a veteran of Northern Ireland (where he got his OBE) and the Falklands, and he also served in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s. Spicer’s (defunct) company, Sandline International took over from Executive Outcomes which was disbanded after South Africa made it illegal for South African nationals to engage in mercenary activities.
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◊ by suskind @ Daily Kos
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BREAKING NEWS: 3 incidents
on London subway + double-decker bus
Yahoo News
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I have always wondered about the availability of the actual terrorist weapons. I remember when plastic explosives were invented, the predictions then were terrible and they have come true.
This statement:
I don’t think stattements that begin with “generally believed” should be reprinted, they are worthless. (speaking of as an Irish Canadian.)
Great diary dear Oui!
I can’t even use a cellphone on the mountain where I live. Barely can get the radio when driving from Sausolito to the Golden Gate Bridge due to the tiny tunnel…
But.. I may be dumber than a doornail but.. what the eff does cordite smell like and how could those witnesses be so sure it was cordite? I can smell smoke and dicern between a forest fire and a Weber grill…and I know what guns/gunpowder can leave a certain smell behind but CORDITE?
Are you talking about the London tube in particular or about metro tunnels in general? Because I can use my cell in the Berlin underground just fine, at least most of the time.
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Is availability of transmitters for wireless technology installed in the tube, similar to adding a tower for better for reception. Cellphone reception quality depends on infrastructure of carrier.
The same can be said for tunnel reception of radio waves.
Pax
PS On the reverse, a corporation can prevent cell phone communication to and from building by metal shielding in the construction of the buildings to block cell phone signals.
It is entirely plausible that the master bomber would not have relied solely on the timer. If a timer failed to detonate one of the bombs, a dupe would be left alive and in possession of the evidence. A simple fail-safe detonator might also have used a mobile phone, perhaps the same one used as the timer in each of the bombs. The London Tube system is not equipped for mobile phone reception, but if the master-bomber backed up the timer by sending a text message to the four bombs, the message would have been delivered to the bomb detonators as soon as the unwitting bomber left the underground and entered a mobile phone reception area on the surface.
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