Three trains, one bus, plus something going on at University College hospital. So far it doesn't seem as serious as July 7th - only one injured, and BBC is suggesting that the blasts were caused by detonators rather than high explosives, but there's also a police chief calling it a "very serious incident".
At the risk of making another stupid comment, this may be an attempt to spread terror on the cheap rather than cause serious damage. Or it could be something worse. No-one seems to know yet...
6 comments:
Trying to turn it into Baghdad? Random, maybe unrelated, small, amateur fanatics doing as much co-ordinated damage/panic as possible.
Hearing John Howard live now - what a fuck knuckle "we won't let terrorism dictate our policy..." Well, why did you invade Iraq? To get terrorists, yes? And now there are more than ever, yes? Who you gonna invade now?
Tony Blair now - "way to defeat it... to show how values of tolerance [will defeat it]... [terrorists] based on a perversion of Islam" Like he's a goddamn Islamic scholar. A Christian lecturing us about other people's religion! Sigh.
It is sad. How many died in Iraq today? How much space does that occupy in the papers?
Posted by Bomber : 7/22/2005 03:07:00 AM
There still seem to be an awful lot of question marks at the moment, that's for sure. Could be anything, copy cats, failed detonations, different group, anything. Time will tell.
I saw just now on BBC 24 that they've also arrested a guy on Whitehall, just by the entrance to Downing Street. Very dramatic looking pictures, but no explanation yet.
And I agree with TS about Howard's performance. He crapped on so long that even BBC News cut away from him before he'd finished. All empty platitudes, spiced up with out and out denial and nonsense. But who could be surprised by that? It's Teflon John.
Posted by Anonymous : 7/22/2005 03:20:00 AM
> How many died in Iraq today? How much space does that occupy in the papers?
1) it occupies less space in the news because we dont care about it as much
2) we also dont care about various events in other countries such as chechnya or various parts of africa that may well be bigger.
The big problem is for the most part the people in places like NZ are concerned with political points scoring not watching events according to the number of people who die. The left right and non political are all equally guilty.
Posted by Anonymous : 7/22/2005 07:27:00 AM
Reading around this morning, it's looking more and more like this is an attack that didn't work than a deliberate attempt to terrify but not kill. The latter would be horribly wasteful anyway, from the terrorists point fo view.
Its also a warning. Those bombs could have gone off (or could have been real); another 50 people could have died. And this could happen every fortnight. Yes, London has survived worse - the toll of July 7th was less than one day of the Blitz - but obviously noone really wants to go through that...
Posted by Idiot/Savant : 7/22/2005 08:51:00 AM
The IRA used to intersperse occasional really big bombs, like Bishopsgate, with attacks using basically glorified fireworks.
The idea was to ensure their warnings were taken seriously and they could shut down the trains several times a year.
Posted by Rich : 7/22/2005 09:44:00 AM
From the looks of things they didn't mix their explosive right. There's reports of a strong smell of acetone from the dud bombs when the detonators went off, so it is possible they're using acetone peroxide (a common off the supermarket shelf guerilla high explosive mix) but didn't mix it right - if you use too much acetone and don't wash it correctly, it is less reliable and lower powered. (on the other hand, if you do mix it right, its fairly powerful, but very very unstable.)
Posted by Weekend_Viking : 7/22/2005 02:25:00 PM
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