Terror attacks: Hour by hour, the smoke clears

Monday, July 02, 2007

By Kim Sengupta and Colin Brown

A controlled explosion was carried out at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, where one of two men arrested at Glasgow airport, critically injured from his burns, was receiving medical treatment under armed police guard. Police said the vehicle was linked to the attack at the airport, where a burning Jeep was driven into the terminal on Saturday afternoon, as well as to addresses being searched near Glasgow.

The police and the security services stated that the two incidents in London and Glasgow were linked and that some members of the group that had carried them out remain free.

The man receiving treatment at the Royal Alexandra Hospital was the driver of the Jeep. Also under arrest is his 27-year-old companion.

Yesterday, raids took place in the town of Houston, in Renfrewshire, in the aftermath of the Glasgow attack. According to local reports, an insular group of people had moved into the area about six weeks ago. Police officers wearing white overalls were seen coming in and out of a semi-detached house in the town six miles west of Glasgow.

South of the border, a 27-year-old woman and a 26-year-old man were arrested on the M6 motorway in Cheshire. A 26-year-old man was also arrested in Liverpool, while raids were also carried out in Newcastle-Under-Lyme, Staffordshire. All three are being held at Paddington Green police station in central London. Three of the five arrested suspects are believed to be foreign nationals.

As the hunt for the terrorist cell spread across the country, the national security alert was raised to the highest possible state of "critical" .

Gordon Brown said there would be intensive police checks at airports, pubs and clubs and on the roads for the foreseeable future. The new Prime Minister added that it was "clear" that the attacks had been` perpetrated by those associated with al-Qa'ida.

Liverpool's John Lennon airport had been closed overnight on Saturday following a terrorist alert there. Glasgow airport was reopened yesterday, with about 20 flights cancelled. Stricter security checks have been brought into other airports across Britain.

At a press conference in Glasgow, where the registration number of the green Jeep Cherokee used in the airport attack ­ L808 RDT ­ was issued, Britain's most senior counter-terrorism officer, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, said: "I am confident ­ absolutely confident ­ that in the coming days and weeks we will be able to gain a thorough understanding of the methods used by the terrorists, of the way in which they planned their attacks, and the network to which they belong."

But the former Scotland Yard commissioner Lord Stevens, who will soon take over as the Prime Minister's security adviser, stated: "The terror of 7/7 was awful enough, but now al-Qa'ida has imported the tactics of Baghdad and Bali to the streets of the UK. And it will get worse before it gets better ... There is growing suspicion that al-Qa'ida operatives ­ possibly British- born ­ have returned from Iraq as well as Afghanistan to guide, direct and influence groups here."

The swift police reaction resulted from examinations of the two cars recovered in London on Friday. Security sources described the two Mercedes limousines, one outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in Haymarket and the other at nearby Cockspur Street, as "hugely useful". Instead of piecing together debris after a blast, specialists at a military forensic explosives laboratory in Kent have been working with intact vehicles "which have been taxed, whose histories can be traced and which contained mobile telephones and fingerprints". The two cars had also been parked in an area with one of the highest concentrations of CCTVs in the country.

Portrait of a botched campaign emerges

Q What are the links between the incidents in London and Glasgow?

A The police and the security services say the same group was responsible and there are marked similarities to what was found in the two Mercedes cars in London and the Jeep driven into Glasgow Airport.

Q How were the London blasts due to take place?

A The cars were packed with gas cylinders, petrol and nails with two mobile telephones, one acting as a back-up, as detonators. Propane gas canisters were opened to fill the first car, outside Tiger Tiger, with gas which would have been detonated with the phones, exploding compressed gas in the cylinders at 20,000 feet per second, creating a fireball from the 200 litres of petrol and spewing out nails for a hundred feet.

Q Was this method similar to the one used in Iraq?

A Vehicle bombs in Iraq have used petrol, but are more typically packed with high explosives which detonate quicker.

Q Was there advanced intelligence of such attacks?

A There have been reports in the media that US authorities had such a warning. Privately, British security sources are sceptical of some of the accounts from across the Atlantic.

Q Who are the people allegedly behind the attacks?

A They are Muslim extremists. It is claimed that members of the group had moved to the Glasgow area in the past six weeks.

Are more such attacks likely?

A The current UK alert state is at its highest. This does not mean such an attack is inevitable, but that the security and intelligence services have information pointing towards another terrorist operation being planned.