Copycats' failure gives vital clues

By STEPHEN WRIGHT and DAVID WILLIAMS

July 23, 2005

WITH four failed suicide bombers on the run, a London Underground passenger told how he came face to face with one of them.

Abisha Moyo had been talking on his mobile when he heard a bang like a pistol shot.

He saw a young man lying with his arms outstretched and eyes closed on top of a backpack.

Miraculously his bomb had failed to go off.

Two weeks to the day after the horrors of July 7, bombers had struck again, once more selecting three Tube trains and a double-decker bus as their targets.

But this time there were no deaths, only one minor injury – and several accounts of the would-be killers at work.

At one Tube station, three passengers fought with a bomber moments after he had tried in vain to trigger his device concealed in a backpack.

He and the other members of his gang all managed to escape, however, and the fear is that they will try to strike again.

Of the four devices, at least one was packed with nails to cause maximum carnage.

They were placed on trains at Shepherds Bush, Warren St and the Oval as well as on a bus in Shoreditch, in east London.

Anti-terror investigators said it was "too early" to say whether the men were linked to the al-Qaeda cell which killed 56 people and injured 700 two weeks earlier.

But they stressed there were strong similarities: the use of backpacks, the identical targets, the apparent co-ordinating and the fact that no warning was given.

Forensic tests will establish whether the devices, which all failed to explode for the same reasons, were made of the same explosives as those used in the previous attack, found at the bomb factory in Leeds or in the hire car left at Luton station by the four suicide bombers.

The devices yesterday were said to be of "smaller quantities" than the 4.5kg in each of the earlier bombs. In two, the detonators had gone off but had failed to trigger the explosives.

It is believed all of the detonators used yesterday were homemade.

One theory is that the devices were smaller because the terrorists had lost so much of their explosives cache in the earlier seizures, where detonators had also been discovered.

Detectives were also exploring the chilling possibility that the failed attacks were copycat strikes by homegrown terrorists inspired by the horrors of July 7.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair was emphatic: the bombers' intentions "must have been to kill".

Crucially, the fact that the bombs failed to go off will provide vital forensic evidence in the hunt for the terrorists, who will also have been caught on CCTV – and seen by dozens of witnesses.

"We do believe that this may represent a significant breakthrough in the sense that there is forensic material at these scenes," Sir Ian said.

One fear for investigators is that as the net closes in, the bombers could conclude that they have nothing to lose and be prepared to take even greater risks to carry out atrocities.

http://dailytelegraph.news.com.au/story.jsp?sectionid=1258&storyid=3487874