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Britain on Edge After Car Slams Into Airport
LONDON, June 30 — One day after the British police discovered what they called a double car-bombing plot in London, two men slammed a Jeep S.U.V. that caught fire into the departure doors at Glasgow Airport as thousands of people awaited flights on the first day of school summer vacations.
The episodes in London and Scotland deepened foreboding among security experts that Britain was confronting a new threat: the use of relatively unsophisticated, homemade explosive devices to claim lives and spread mayhem.
Britain raised its assessment of the threat from terrorism to “critical,” the highest level, meaning that an attack is imminent, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said. It had been at “severe” since a major alert over an alleged conspiracy last August to bomb transatlantic airliners using liquid explosives.
A British security official, speaking in return for customary anonymity, said the heightened level reflected an assessment that the London and Glasgow attacks were “linked in some ways and, therefore, there are clearly individuals who have the capability and intent to carry out further attacks.”
The episode in Scotland produced dramatic images, shown on television from shaky video shot on passengers’ cellphones, of an orange fireball at the airport entrance doors.
Accounts by eyewitnesses were confused, but some spoke of the two occupants of the car — both described by witnesses as men of South Asian descent — smashing bottles of gasoline and struggling with police and others who tried to restrain them.
One of the men in the car was said to have been ablaze, possibly after setting himself on fire. The police said two men were arrested.
The events at Glasgow Airport came as London braced for a weekend of high-profile public events including a concert to honor the memory of Diana, Princess of Wales, a Gay Pride March and the Wimbledon tennis tournament.
The police in the capital stepped up foot patrols as counterterrorism officers hunted suspects linked to the rigged cars found in London.
But the episode in Scotland seemed to have taken the authorities by surprise. Gordon Brown, the newly installed prime minister who is himself a Scot, summoned an emergency meeting of the high-level security committee called Cobra to try to come to grips with the newest attack.
American officials stepped up surveillance at airports in the United States but did not raise the overall threat level, which remained at yellow, or “elevated,” for the country and orange, or “high,” for domestic and international flights.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security said Saturday that they were monitoring events in the United Kingdom but had “no intelligence that there is a credible threat in the U.S. based on these events.”
In London, counterterrorism experts suggested that the bombers who abandoned the two explosives-laden Mercedes sedans in central London may have been what a senior Western official called “less directed from Al Qaeda and more a matter of a homegrown group,” although the attack seemed to be modeled on terrorist attacks in Iraq.
Several experts and officials said the technology behind the foiled bombings seemed to be amateurish. While the attackers apparently tried to detonate the bombs using cellphones, “they didn’t go off because there were not top-grade people putting them together,” the Western official said, speaking in return for anonymity because he was not authorized to brief reporters.
If the plot turns out to be the work of a small, hitherto undetected cell, that could raise alarms that Britain’s terrorism threat is broader than the 2,000 suspected radicals known to the authorities, according to British and Western officials. “If we had never heard of them before, it means the problem is even bigger,” a British official said, speaking according to the same ground rules. The Western official said British investigators were pursuing several “good leads.”
The events in Scotland seemed marked by the same sense of an improvised attack.
BAA, the company operating the airport, said a vehicle “drove into a front door at the check in area” and “caught fire on impact.”
One witness, Scott Leeson, said the Jeep sped up to the building at around 30 miles per hour in an area where people usually drive much more slowly.
“Then the driver swerved the car around so he could ram straight into the door,” the Press Association news agency quoted Mr. Leeson as saying. “He must have been trying to smash straight through. Luckily he did not get the car too far in. He just managed to get the nose of the Jeep inside,” he said.
Another witness, Lynsey McBean, 26, said, “We saw a green Cherokee drive straight into the front door of the airport but it got jammed. They were obviously trying to get it further inside the airport as the wheels were spinning and smoke was coming from them. One of the men, I think it was the driver, brought out a plastic petrol canister and poured it under the car. He then set light to it,” she said, according to the Press Association.
“At that point a policeman came over, the passenger got out of the car and punched him. At that point I began to run away. But when I looked back several people had run over to try and stop the men, who were Asian. I could see that one of the men was on fire,” she said.
In London, no one took responsibility publicly for the foiled attack on Friday, which was thwarted almost by accident when an ambulance crew and traffic wardens on Friday separately discovered the sedans packed with gasoline, gas canisters and nails.
But an online forum monitored by the SITE Institute, which tracks jihadist Web sites, asked whether London had been “craving explosions from Al Qaeda” after authorities in June bestowed a knighthood on the author Salman Rushdie, reviled by some radical Muslims for his book “The Satanic Verses.”
No “established link” exists between the knighthood and the foiled bombings, a British security official said, speaking in return for anonymity, but the posting on the jihadist site was likely to be closely scrutinized by investigators.
The British news media have asserted that if the bombs had gone off they would likely have caused havoc and huge loss of life, but some experts have questioned the level of sophistication involved in the devices, which officials call vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices.
The Times of London reported Saturday that the police had warned nightclub operators a few days ago of the threat of such attacks.
The two cars were parked around a corner from each other. The first to be discovered and disarmed was found outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub on the Haymarket near Piccadilly Circus. The second was towed away for a parking infraction about 90 minutes later from nearby Cockspur Street leading to Trafalgar Square, the police said.
In the United States, Strategic Forecasting, a private research group, said the “amateur construction” of the explosive device “and the way it was placed suggest the plotter or plotters have no connection to a major militant organization.”
Sajjan M. Gohel, a security expert, said the police were pursuing a theory that the two bombs had been designed to explode one after the other — the first to bring people into the street and the second to cause great loss of life. The fact that Thursday night at Tiger Tiger was ladies’ night, he said, recalled a conspiracy in 2004 in which British-born bombers said they wanted to attack women at a nightclub, whom they viewed as promiscuous, in conversations monitored by British intelligence.
In their hunt for the would-be bombers, the British police say they are poring over thousands of images from the closed-circuit television cameras that film the streets of central London.
[NY Times]
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