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Carnage averted in London

Hasan Suroor

Car bomb sends a chill through the city

— PHOTO: AFP

POTENTIAL DISASTER: The car, which police said contained a “potentially viable explosive device”, being loaded onto a lorry for removal on Friday. The vehicle was found parked outside a bar in central London.

LONDON: A bomb with the potential to kill “hundreds” of people was found in a car in the heart of London’s tourist district early on Friday sending a chill through the city still recovering from the July 7 bombings whose second anniversary falls next week.

Police admitted they had no intelligence about an impending attack and it was sheer luck that the bomb was detected and defused in good time. It was found placed in a green metallic Mercedez parked outside a popular nightclub “Tiger Tiger” in Haymarket, West End — a short walk from Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, and full of theatres, nightclubs, bars and restaurants.

The explosive was discovered shortly before 2 a.m. when the area is normally full of people leaving nightclubs and bars. “It is obvious that if the device had detonated there could have been significant injury or loss of life,” Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command said. The casualties could have been “in hundreds”, he added.

Gordon Brown, only in his second day as Prime Minister, said it showed that Britain continued to face a “serious and continuous threat”. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who chaired a meeting of the Government’s emergency unit, Cobra, said the security services were doing “everything possible to protect the public.”

Police were not able to corroborate an eyewitness account that the driver of the car was seen “running away” after “crashing” the vehicle in a trash bin outside the nightclub. They appealed to public to come forward if they had any information.

Mr. Clarke declined to “speculate” who might have been behind the attempted attack or whether the nightclub was the target saying the investigation had just begun.

However, he said it was known that nightclubs were potential terror targets, and the incident “resonated” with previous terror plots.

The BBC claimed it had been told that “international elements” were believed to be involved. Mr. Clarke said police were alerted by an ambulance crew which had been called to attend to treat a person who had taken ill at Tiger Tiger nightclub. The crew informed the police when they noticed what they thought was “smoke” coming out of the car. When police searched the car they found “significant quantities” of petrol in several large containers and a number of gas cylinders in the car.

A device, described as a “car bomb primed to explode”, was manually defused by explosives officers while a nationwide hunt for the culprit or culprits was launched.

The entire area — a busy thoroughfare — was cordoned off causing widespread disruption throughout the day.

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