Police say the area will be closed for some time

 

Police have disabled a car bomb containing gas cylinders in the heart of central London.

 

Officers carried out a controlled explosion after reports of a suspicious vehicle parked in Haymarket shortly before 0200 BST (0100 GMT).

The area was cordoned off while police examined what they described as a "potentially viable explosive device".

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Britain faces "a serious and continuous threat".

He added the public "need to be alert" at all times.

The prime minister's comments were echoed by the new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith who has chaired a meeting of the government's emergency unit Cobra.

The BBC's Andy Tighe said the timing was significant coming a day after Gordon Brown became prime minister, and with the second anniversary of the 7 July bombings approaching.

 

A witness reported seeing gas canisters being removed from the car, a silver Mercedes, at around 0400 BST (0300 GMT).

 

TRAVEL DISRUPTIONS

Piccadilly Circus tube station closed

Haymarket closed between Pall Mall and Piccadilly Circus

Buses diversions in the area with delays of more than 45 minutes

Heavy traffic around Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross Rd

Coventry St, Whitcomb St, Shaftesbury Ave and Cambridge Circus closed

 

 

 

Bouncers from a nearby nightclub said they saw the car being driven erratically before it crashed into a bin. They said the driver then got out and ran off.

Police sources have confirmed that gas canisters were involved in the incident, close to Piccadilly Circus.

But Scotland Yard has refused to comment on reports that a large number of nails were found in the car.

One police source said the bomb was a "big device" and posed a real and substantial threat to the area around Haymarket, which is in London's theatreland.

But a Westminster source said it was a "relatively small" device.

Dozens of forensic officers examined the scene and the car was removed for further examination.

Scotland Yard said detectives from Counter Terrorism Command were investigating the potential bomb plot and will be checking the CCTV in the area.

Police are believed to have also carried out a search of other key areas in the capital shortly after the discovery of the car.

A spokesman said: "Police were called to reports of a suspicious vehicle parked in Haymarket, shortly before 2am this morning.

"As a precautionary measure the immediate area was cordoned off while the vehicle was examined by explosives officers.

"They discovered what appeared to be a potentially viable explosive device. This was made safe."

Police say Haymarket is likely to remain closed for some time and severe travel disruption is predicted.

Piccadilly Circus Tube station is closed and trains are not stopping, while local bus services are being diverted.

The BBC's Daniela Relph, at the scene, said the heart of London was completely closed off and police officers were concentrating on keeping people away.

'No intelligence'

Professor Paul Wilkinson, a terrorism expert, said a passer-by had tipped off the police and officers would be concerned they did not have prior intelligence.

The current terrorism threat level has been classed as severe - meaning an attack is highly likely - since 14 August 2006.

Intelligence sources said they were keeping an open mind on who was responsible for the car bomb.

Surrounding streets were closed

 

 

The BBC's security correspondent Frank Gardner said the incident had "come from nowhere" and that the driver of the car was now Britain's "most wanted".

He added that the police would be in charge of the investigation and that CCTV was the key to finding the "first clue" as to who was behind the attempted bombing.

John O'Connor, former commander of Scotland Yard's Flying Squad, told BBC News the incident bore all the "hallmarks" of a failed suicide bomb attempt. And it was "lucky" the police had received the tip-off .

Defence Secretary Des Browne said: "It does appear to be a very serious incident. "My first reaction to this is, thank God that we have police and explosives experts who can make these devices safe, and the arrangements they appear to have done, and that nobody has been injured." Extra security measures have been put in place at Westminster, MPs and peers have been told.

I checked the worst news channel in the world (Fox News) and they have people on who already seem to know who is behind the attacks. After less than two seconds of switching on I heard 'Al-Qaeda' mentioned, 'Terror Cells' and the words "Well, I believe it is terrorism"...

 

What the hell does "I believe it is terrorism" mean?

 

Because obviously, if ANYONE fills a car with explosive materials that has a detonator it IS terrorism. What the guy meant was "I believe it is 'Islamic/Muslim' terrorism"

 

I thought the American news channels would be having a terrorism frenzy over this and I am right.

 

Nobody knows who was behind it yet.

I do...

 

...It was Prince Philip telling everybody he was still in charge...

 

...I get my coat

Police hunting London car bombers

 

 

Anti-terrorism police have launched a huge manhunt for the people who planted two car bombs in central London.

 

Police, who have described events as "troubling", are studying hours of CCTV footage in the search for suspects.

 

The cars - both Mercedes - were packed with nails, petrol and gas cylinders, but the devices were not detonated.

 

One car was found outside a nightclub near Piccadilly Circus early on Friday, while the second was towed to a Park Lane pound before its device was found.

 

Security reviewed

 

Good progress is said to have already been made in the search of CCTV, with unconfirmed reports suggesting police may have an image of a suspect leaving the vehicle left outside the Tiger Tiger club in Haymarket.

 

Meanwhile, police have increased their patrols of the capital and are reviewing security for a number of public events taking place in the city this weekend.

 

They said the safety of the public was their top priority and urged everyone to remain vigilant.

 

News that the second Mercedes also contained explosive materials came on Friday evening, several hours after details of the car abandoned outside Tiger Tiger had emerged.

 

Both contained bombs which were similar, potentially viable and clearly linked, police said.

 

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism command, said the discovery of the second device was "obviously troubling" and "reinforces the need for the public to be alert".

 

"There was a considerable amount of fuel and gas canisters, as in the first vehicle. There was also a substantial quantity of nails," he said.

 

Speaking earlier about the first bomb, DAC Clarke said: "It is obvious that if the device had detonated there could have been serious injury or loss of life."

The government's emergencies committee, known as Cobra, will be meeting on Saturday morning to discuss the attempted bombings.

 

The meeting could be chaired by either Prime Minister Gordon Brown or Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.

 

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner said the discovery of the second car was prompting investigators to suspect the involvement of al-Qaeda sympathisers.

 

"Simultaneous, co-ordinated bombs have historically been a distinguishing feature of [al-Qaeda's] anti-Western attacks," he said.

 

Petrol smell

 

Our correspondent said Western intelligence agencies had detected recent discussion about targeting Britain among jihadis in the UK and abroad.

 

But Whitehall sources said there had not been any specific intelligence and no-one has yet claimed to have been behind the attempted bombings.

 

The second bomb was found in a blue 280E model Mercedes in a Park Lane car pound, where it had been towed at 0330 BST on Friday after being given a ticket for illegally parking in Cockspur Street, near Trafalgar Square.

 

Police were alerted after staff who had heard about the Haymarket bomb noticed a strong smell of petrol coming from it.

 

Officers had been alerted to the first bomb by an ambulance crew who had been called to Tiger Tiger nightclub at 0125 BST to deal with a separate incident.

 

They had spotted smoke - now believed to have been vapour from the petrol in the car - inside a metallic green Mercedes parked outside the club.

 

Bomb experts later manually disabled the device, preventing what police sources said could have been "carnage".

 

Scotland Yard declined to comment on reports a mobile phone that may have been intended to trigger the explosion was found in the Mercedes.

 

Mobiles have been used to detonate bombs in Iraq and Indonesia and in other terror attacks, such as the 2004 Madrid bombings.

 

Both cars have been taken away for forensic examination.

 

The attempted car bombings have echoes of other foiled terror plots in the UK.

 

'Significant timing'

 

Five men were jailed for life in April for a bomb plot linked to al-Qaeda that planned to use a fertiliser bomb to target a shopping centre and a nightclub.

 

And Dhiren Barot was jailed for life last November for conspiring to park limousines packed with gas canisters underneath high-profile buildings before detonating them.

 

DAC Clarke said the Haymarket incident "resonated" with previous cases.

 

Meanwhile, correspondents say the timing of the car bombs was significant - coming two days after Mr Brown became prime minister, and with the second anniversary of the 7 July bombings approaching.

 

The current terror threat level has been classed severe - one level lower than the highest "critical" - since 14 August 2006.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6255452.stm

If that bomb did go off, it wouldn't have done anything...

 

...It was in a Merc 200E, one of the toughest cars around, the explosion would have been kept inside.

Countering the frothing rabid hysteria that is being whipped up by a fervent media in response to three failed car "bomb" attacks in the last few days in the UK, ex-CIA agent Larry Johnson joined Keith Olbermann to underscore the truth behind the madness - that the so-called bombs were primitive at best and would not have killed anybody.

 

Watch the video below.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK5-jIfOBjQ

Guy speaks sense. Still a bit mute on the government sponsored stuff but listen to what they say.

 

In the immediate aftermath of the discovery of a Mercedes parked outside a London night club containing up to 60 litres of petrol and a similar second vehicle, authorities claimed that the bombs would have caused "carnage" had they been detonated, killing hundreds of people.

 

A burning Jeep that was driven into a terminal building at Glasgow Airport yesterday was also believed to contain petrol, but failed to explode beyond simply burning out the interior of the vehicle.

 

The truth about the "deadly" car bombs that led to airports and other transit systems being closed across the country as well as the UK terror threat level being raised to critical is that they displayed an almost laughable level of proficiency and would not have killed anyone.

 

"This is not one of the truck bombs or car bombs we see going off in Iraq - what's really striking about this today is that you had two non-bombs in London when we had at least five bombs in Baghdad in which U.S. soldiers were killed in one of those so I think it's just out of proportion - this was an incendiary, this was not a high explosive," said Johnson.

 

Johnson said that had the gas been ignited properly, there would have been a loud boom that would have split the tank but that no projectiles would have even exited the vehicle.

 

"If someone was within 20, 30 feet of it they would have ear damage but not much more," said Johnson.

 

 

Johnson contrasted how the media glaze over deadly car bombings in Iraq which occur every day "And then you have a non-event in London and we're going to battle quarters and beginning to give the hairy eyeball to every Muslim."

 

Olbermann called the terrorists, "the graduating Al-Qaeda bomb squad that need remedial work" while attacking the concept that we're fighting them in Iraq so as to not have to fight them over here."

 

He also called out the so-called counter-terrorism experts who have hyped this non-event on television to enhance the profile of the counter-terror companies that they head up.

 

As Johnson outlines, fewer than 50,000 people worldwide have died as a result of terror attacks since the 60's, and as we recently highlighted, accident causing deer, swimming pools and peanut allergies have all proven more deadly than international terrorism.

 

The true extent of the damage that could have been caused by these recent attacks pales in comparison to the overblown exaggerated hype that the authorities have claimed and that the media has willingly parroted.

 

Similar attacks were a staple of the 60's and 70's but the government and the media downplayed them because they were of minimal threat to anyone and to hype such non-events was handing a propaganda victory to the terrorists.

 

Since the very definition of terrorism is to influence government policy not by the attack itself but by hyping fear of new attacks, the government of Gordon Brown is engaging in terrorism by strongly intimating that fresh attacks are inevitable.

 

Brown came to power with an agenda to push through new anti-terror laws including wiretaps being admissible in court and extending the 28-day detention without charge law to 90 days. Though such proposals failed under Blair and Brown was expecting a fight to get them passed, expect them to breeze through Parliament with little opposition following the outright panic that has been generated as a result of recent events.

NOTE: I actually think that these "attacks" are probably real Terror and probably not the government. But that is always something that elite sections of government rely on. We actually piss people of so much that they do what the government want......plant bombs etc.

 

Thing is these guys we pretty stupid and didn't do much physical damage. Although the Government/Media have taken advantage of the events by linking everything to Al-Qaeda used disgusting psychological techniques and used the events further push their police state plans. Which is perfect for them.

 

It's the governments attitude and solution that is disgusting. It's all about scaring us into submission.

A TV talking head has finally characterized last week's non-events in Britain for what they were, in the face of a blitz of frenzied hype, hysterics and fearmongering from the government and media, former Scotland Yard detective John O'Connor described the botched attacks as "hopeless," "incompetent" "almost laughable," and amounting to nothing more than a bonfire.

 

Watch the video below.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhJZqtta3c4

 

"This was a hopeless, incompetent terrorist attack, I mean when you see the ludicrous situation when none of the bombs were able to be detonated and these guys are then trying to set fire to petrol,"

 

"All they got was a bonfire, they set fire to fuel - well that in its own way is not going to detonate the gas cylinders and it's not going to cause an explosion - it was just a fire, I mean that is so incompetent as to be almost laughable."

 

O'Connor also insisted that the perpetrators of the attack should be referred to as "jihadists" rather than Al-Qaeda, which is what the frothing media hurriedly declared them to be just hours after the dud "bombs" were discovered in London.

 

Others have been less sympathetic, labeling the goons who attempted to ram a Jeep into an airport terminal in Glasgow as "Beavis and Butthead" or, as Register writer Lewis Page, a former armed forces bomb-disposal operator, calls them, "Krazy Klown jihadis" who were engaged in "slapstick idiocy".

"These have to be some of the most pathetic terror attacks ever," writes Page, "difficult to distinguish from minor accidents. For goodness' sake, a car is full of petrol anyway; and gas cylinders too often enough. People drive cylinders of gas around all the time. Now and again - oh my god! - they probably carry boxes of nails, bolts, tools or whatever in the same vehicle. (Aiee!)"

 

"This kind of event happens on the motorways almost every day, at least the petrol fires and often enough with the other hazards added. The roads get closed off as a result, sometimes for hours - just like the Haymarket did on Friday morning. It causes massive inconvenience to lots and lots of people."

 

"But the perimeter is manned by firemen and traffic cops, not bomb teams and terror-feds. And so this weekend a minor news story - one injured in bunt-out car / suicide attempt causes travel chaos - becomes a big international media frenzy, a "test of the new Prime Minister's mettle," if you please."

 

The hysteria continued in the UK today after Stansted Airport was temporarily shut down following the discovery of an unattended bag whose owner had presumably deserted it to visit the toilet.

 

And a new level of absurdity was reached when authorities decided to carry out controlled explosions on a car that was parked outside a Glasgow Mosque last night - no dangerous materials were found in the vehicle. Because obviously one of the primary targets for Muslim terrorists are Muslim Mosques!

 

While in America, pipe bombs at a Disney theme park that blew off doors later turned out to be firecrackers in a trash can that fizzed and spluttered.

 

Now every discarded pack of sandwiches is a potentially "suspicious device" as Britain cowers in fear of the next terrorist atrocity - who knows, maybe they'll set off a firework or knock over a stack of bean cans in the supermarket.

 

While the majority of Brits are more interested in putting up shelves than some retards setting fire to a car, the media has deserted common sense for good and welcomed another opportunity to terrify the public, providing terror where there was none and thereby facilitating the amateur jihadist's agenda by hyping a peril that simply doesn't exist.

 

News anchors devour every breaking detail about the dastardly doctor bombers while an endless loop of Beavis and Butthead's car crash dominates the background, blown up and overpixelated in a desperate ploy to beef up its significance. They also revel in yet another excuse to show burly cops with machine guns, the enforcers ordering people around, searching cars and demanding complete compliance.

 

The reality is that accident causing deer, peanut allergies and swimming pools are allmore likely to seal your fate than a terrorist attack.

 

As Ohio State University's John Mueller concludes in a report entitled A False Sense Of Insecurity, "For all the attention it evokes, terrorism actually causes rather little damage and the likelihood that any individual will become a victim in most places is microscopic."

But the sensationalist media, the power hungry government and the bottom line fretting "experts" who head up profitable anti-terror companies all need to feed the beast and they'll exploit every morsel on offer.

 

Terrorism can only be effective if the relatively minor acts of violence that are perpetrated are given false prominence and artificially inflated to the point where the dread of what's coming next fundamentally alters the way we go about our lives, travel, commerce, and the way we treat others, until we ultimately acquiesce to the terrorist's goal - relinquishing our freedoms and living in fear.

 

Since that is the very definition of terrorism, recent events only confirm that the terrorists have already won and that their victory was secured with the enthusiastic support of the government and the media.

I don't know why anyone was even shocked. It was only ever going to be a matter of time before something like this happened, as the threat had never disappeared.

If you allow yourself to be worried, live in fear, or change your normal routine all because of something that might happen any time, then you only have yourself to blame, not the fanatics.;)

Exactly. That's why everyone must question the motive behind making a huge deal out of this.

 

IRA bombs were, in comparison, played down by the government/media because they did not want to cause pubic hysteria and panic as this is a primary objective of terrorism.

 

Now all we see/hear on the news is a burning jeep and talk of Al-Qaeda and the war and all that bollocks. It was even worse in the US - having watched their news channels throughout I must say they reported in an irresponsible fashion.

 

This was, as described by experts, a none event - in which our security forces actually tracked down the people involved 6 hours before the Glasgow incident. And they were already known to MI5 prior. Just like they always are!

 

I've had enough of this crap. It's looking like LIHOP. (Google it)

Exactly. That's why everyone must question the motive behind making a huge deal out of this.

 

IRA bombs were, in comparison, played down by the government/media because they did not want to cause pubic hysteria and panic as this is a primary objective of terrorism.

 

Now all we see/hear on the news is a burning jeep and talk of Al-Qaeda and the war and all that bollocks. It was even worse in the US - having watched their news channels throughout I must say they reported in an irresponsible fashion.

 

This was, as described by experts, a none event - in which our security forces actually tracked down the people involved 6 hours before the Glasgow incident. And they were already known to MI5 prior. Just like they always are!

 

I've had enough of this crap. It's looking like LIHOP. (Google it)

 

All the disruption has turned out to be far worse than the actual attacks themselves.