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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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