Inconsistency explained.
From The Sunday Times
July 1, 2007
CCTV and phone records may yield vital clues
Jonathan Calvert and David Leppard
IT WAS well after midnight when the light green Mercedes drew up close to the Tiger Tiger nightclub in Haymarket, the busy thoroughfare between Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square.
The nightclub is a popular haunt with “out of towners” who travel in from the home counties. Girls with skimpy outfits and fake tans danced on the vast dancefloor as up to 1,000 clubbers crushed into the venue on Thursday night.
For one reveller it was all too much. An ambulance was called at 1am to attend to a young man who had fallen over and hit his head. Unwittingly, his fall may have saved scores of lives.
After patching up the man, the returning paramedics, aged 27 and 37, noticed fumes filling up the interior of the Mercedes parked outside the doorway of the club.
The 37-year-old, who was not named, said: “As we pulled up outside Tiger Tiger, we came to a stop behind a Mercedes car, which was parked rather badly, about 3ft from the kerb.
“It had its lights on but the engine was off. I thought I saw a jet of smoke coming out from between the front seats and my crewmate also noticed there was a funny smell of gas.”
A quick look inside the window was enough to cause alarm. Through the fumes they could see the car was filled with large propane gas cylinders and a number of petrol cans. The police were called and the club began to be evacuated.
Rajeshree Patel, a 41-year-old civil servant, was one of the first to leave. He was ushered through a back door but came back round to pick up his car from Haymarket.
He said: “I saw the Mercedes car with its door open and I saw a uniformed police officer look into the back of the car. He popped his head in and two seconds later he just ran away from the car.”
One woman says she was approached by a police officer who told her: “You need to make a move, love. You don’t want to be scraped off the floor now, do you?”
Outside there was drama and heroism as the bomb disposal experts began tackling the car.
They were confronted with a huge explosive device. Inside were at least three 3ft-high cylinders of propane gas, of the sort used for barbecues, and petrol cans containing as much as 200 litres of fuel. Nails had been scattered among them for maximum damage.
Somebody had poured petrol over the interior and turned on the taps from the propane gas cylinders. The leaking gas and saturated petrol created a deadly cocktail.
It is London’s good fortune that the vapour cloud was also the flaw in the plot, because it had produced the fumes spotted by the paramedics. Had this not happened, the explosion and carnage could have been horrendous.
At New Scotland Yard dozens of detectives from the Counter Terrorist Command (CTC) are in a race this weekend to find those responsible for the Haymarket bomb and for a second car bomb parked on a nearby street. In the biggest hunt since the July bombings two years ago, Peter Clarke, the deputy assistant commissioner in charge of counter-terrorism, is orchestrating what may be the greatest investigative challenge of his long policing career.
Yesterday Whitehall officials were remaining silent about reports that police had already identified three of their suspects. They are thought to be young British-based Muslims.
They were also refusing to discuss reports that they had a “crystal clear” CCTV image of a man leaving the Mercedes car outside Tiger Tiger.
But raising the prospect of imminent arrests, a well-placed official said: “It’s promising. They are on the trail. They are confident they can get to the bottom of this.”
The Haymarket device was designed to be ignited by a small booster charge linked to two mobile phones.
Investigators believe it was intended that the phones inside the car would be called by the bomber using a third mobile, once he had reached a safe distance from the abandoned car.
One person with knowledge of the bomb said: “The car was full of fumes. The idea seems to have been to create an explosive mixture inside the car so when the phone detonation took place, that would set the whole thing off.”
Somebody appears to have called the mobiles in the car. But neither the first mobile, nor its back-up, triggered the detonator.
One report said police initially brought in a robot to defuse the bomb but it could not “see” the device because the gas and petrol fumes were so thick.
With great courage, a bomb technician in protective gear reached into the car and did the highly dangerous work by hand.
At about the same time – around 2am – a second, almost identical Mercedes was found parked in Cockspur Street, just 200 yards from the first vehicle. According to witnesses, the light blue car had been left in a bus stop bay outside the busy Thai Square restaurant.
The area is the hub of Trafalgar Square’s nightlife, with an array of popular bars nearby, including the Albannach, the Texas Embassy and the cocktail bar at the Trafalgar hotel. These attract young revellers and dozens of people were also waiting at three bus stops to catch night buses home.
Despite being so close to the Haymarket drama, the second Mercedes was not spotted by the police. Traffic wardens noticed it was parked illegally, however, and one hour later a tow truck took it to the NCP headquarters in Park Lane, where it arrived at 3.14am.
Billy McCoid, the NCP duty manager, said: “As usual, we did preliminary checks looking for any children or animals inside the vehicle. We are not trained to look for bombs. We did not notice anything suspicious about the vehicle whatsoever.”
McCoid and his colleagues left the car in an overground parking bay opposite their control room. It remained there, just yards from the five staff working the night shift, until 8am when a new team arrived.
While it is not standard procedure to check cars that have arrived overnight, they decided to do so. When they looked through the window of the Mercedes, staff say they saw “everything”.
One member of staff, who did not want to be named, said: “We were terrified. What we saw will stay with us. We saw everything, exactly what was in there, where it was and the smell. But if we hadn’t seen it nobody would have known it was there.”
Clarke and his counter-terrorism team know the terrorists will be deeply disappointed at their failure to carry out mass murder.
He knows, too, that it will not be difficult for them to build other bombs and that he must get to them before they have a chance to do so.
A dedicated team of officers is now watching thousands of hours of CCTV footage from shops, clubs and restaurants in the area around Haymarket and Cockspur Street.
Capita Symonds, the company that runs a network of surveillance cameras covering every car to enter and leave central London, believes it is “highly likely” the would-be bombers have been caught on camera.
The “ring of steel” monitors 52 entrances to central London, taking photographs of vehicle numberplates, the cars themselves and the drivers. The location of the cameras is not publicly disclosed.
Police have already used the database provided by the security network to track down and interview the previous owners of the Mercedes that were used in the attempted London car bomb attacks. Officers are still going through footage as they attempt to track down the present owners.
Beverli Rhodes, head of security at Capita Symonds, said: “It is very likely that whoever drove those cars will be caught on camera. The system is top-of-the-range technology and the pictures are exceptionally high quality.
“If they used any of those roads going through the ring of steel, then they would be captured on those cameras.”
By failing to explode their bombs, the terrorists also handed investigators a forensic goldmine.
Both cars were taken on Friday to the military forensic explosives laboratory in Kent, where scientists are trawling for fingerprints, DNA and even microscopic clothing fibres that they hope will provide breakthrough clues to the identity of the bombers.
The memory in the retrieved mobile phones will give detectives a clue to all the other numbers they have been in contact with.
But more importantly, a little known technique can tell police not just who a caller has been calling, but can help pinpoint the journey of each phone as it travelled to the bomb site. Known as cell site analysis, the method can also be used to track phones and those who travel with them as they move “live” around the country.
“In almost every major terrorist investigation, it’s been the phones which have kicked the whole thing off,” one investigator said.
“DNA and fingerprints can take days to analyse. But a phone’s memory is instantly accessible. Cell site analysis is critical not just for reconstructing what has happened. It can help tell us where suspects are when we are looking for them.”
Background and video footage
- ‘We are not going to stay inside because terrorists want to kill some people’
The terrorist attempt to blow up a London nightclub has failed to dampen the enthusiasm of young people for a night out in the capital, write Abul Taher and Claire Newell.
Club-goers started to queue outside the Tiger Tiger club near Piccadilly Circus, one of the targets for the car bombers, as soon as police lifted their security cordon at 10pm on Friday night.
All around London’s West End the mood was one of defiance, mirroring the way Londoners went back on to Tube trains and buses after the 7/7 attacks of 2005.
Sophie Spencer, 23, a lettings manager from Cheltenham who came to London for a friend’s hen night, said: “We did speak about the car bomb but thought that in actual fact tonight was probably one of the safest nights to be out in London because there are so many police about.
“You have to be brave and stand up to the terrorists, let them know that you are still going to live your life and have a good time.”
Malvina Smolka, 20, an au pair from Poland, was one of the first people to try to enter Tiger Tiger although its doors remained closed until last night. Smolka, from West Norwood, south London, said: “This is my favourite club. I come to this club at least once every month. I like its music, the staff here and the other clientele.
“I don’t think it’s just London where you can become the victim of a terrorist attack it’s everywhere now, it’s impossible to get away from.”
Tiger Tiger was probably targeted because of the ease of access for a terrorist gang. It is in Haymarket, one of London’s leading thoroughfares and wide enough for vehicles to park without blocking traffic.
The glass frontage of the club meant an extra dimension of broken shards would be added to the fireball and volley of nails created by the blast.
One security source said: “In the bombers’ eyes the club-goers would have included City types. Tiger Tiger offered easy access, unlike the nightclubs in narrower streets where the bombers would have stood out. It has got a glass front and the bouncers are positioned inside rather than out on the pavement because it is a restaurant as well as a club.”
Tiger Tiger, spread over three floors, advertises itself as a fusion of east and west, exactly the sort of notion that Islamic militants oppose. It has nine branches from Aberdeen to Portsmouth.
It was “ladies’ night” at Tiger Tiger on Thursday, and the club was crowded with more than 1,000 revellers enjoying a retro disco atmosphere. Many were professional women taking advantage of a ladies’ night deal to sip mojito cocktails.
Katie Smith, 21, a student from Rainham, Kent, said: “It’s scary to think lots of people could have died, but you have to just get on with your life. It’s important to have fun and do what you want to do.”
Bride-to-be Sarah Manning, 26, from Newcastle, who arrived at Tiger Tiger last night with 10 friends for a hen night said: “We were determined to have a tacky night out and there is no way I will let the terrorists ruin my big night out with friends.”
Amy Toner, 24, one of her friends, said: “I won’t stop my life for them.”
- Echoes of IRA
They say only the foolhardy need apply, but once again London’s bomb disposal officers are back in the front line as the threat of car bombs returns to the city’s streets, writes Jon Ungoed-Thomas.
During the IRA’s mainland campaign in the 1970s, these Scotland Yard officers were regarded with awe as they dismantled bombs across the capital. Those who survived were said to have “angels fluttering on their shoulders”.
It was then a regular occurrence for bombs to be defused by hand. One of the most experienced bomb disposal officers, Geoffrey Biddle, is said to have defused four bombs in four days, including one at the Chelsea Boat Show and another in Ealing, west London.
Today’s bomb squad has “robots” that can remove detonators before destroying them with a controlled explosion. But in the early hours of Friday morning officers defused by hand.
Reg Journet, secretary of the Royal Engineers Bomb Disposal Branch, said: “It was an extremely brave thing to do. They would have known the bomb was meant to be set off remotely and if that had happened they would be blown to bits.”
The composition of Friday’s bombs was reminiscent of devices seen in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The use of two bombs, known as the “double tap”, was deployed by the IRA. The first bomb is designed to cause mayhem and mass evacuation, the second to maim, terrorise and kill those on the streets.
Similarly, the use of nails could also have been taken out of the IRA handbook. The IRA used to gather metal shards from shipyards to lay around explosives, referred to by bomb disposal experts as “shipyard confetti”.
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