Returned from school with pain in my back…

This morning I drove to school with a headwind of +/- 43 kts. Simply horrible. I had a bit of pain in my back and I thought it would go away after a while, but it didn’t. The second class (religion, the most boring class of the whole week…) it became worse and worse. In the end I asked or I could just go to the secretary, where they told me I was looking very pale (very unusual for me) and didn’t looked really healthy. I was asked or I wanted to phone my parents and so I did. The school day (read: morning) ended at past to twelve A.M…

I’m 17 now (my anniversary is the 14th of February by the way) and I can tell you one thing: it’s horrible to have pain in your back! I feel like somebody who’s ninety years old or so, in a wheelchair….frustrating ? You bet!

Now I’ve kept myself calm and layed a bit on the sofa, and it’s a bit better. I hope to go back to school tomorrow, but if it isn’t better tomorrow morning the doctor advised me to go the eh…(good grief, I’ve got to take the dictionary to look up the word…don’t know it in English…)…’fysiotherapist’.

Now, wait and see the ‘Rosbifs’ (French nickname for English and or British people) say, so…

While I’m writing this I still wonder which screenshot I’m going to enter for the April FlightSimX.be screenshot contest. In case you want to help choosing one (the theme is military, so it’s either a Tornado or a Bristol Fighter screenshot)…you may always post a comment and give me the name of the file (just copy the link, that’s the easiest way…) you like the most .

You can watch two slideshows of my best shots of both a/c, it’s more handy instead of watching page per page (my album there contains 400 + screenshots…).
My Photobucket album

One of my favorite YouTube videos!

There’s one user I check regularly, and that’s Lotus/Ramasurinen: www.youtube.com/user/Ramasurinen.
He makes great videos with Flight Simulator X and has some pritty planes in his hangar…

Russia Expels 4 British Diplomats

MOSCOW, July 19 — Russia expelled four British diplomats today, in response to Britain’s expulsion of the same number of Russian diplomats earlier this week. The British move came over Russia’s refusal to extradite a key suspect in the fatal poisoning of a former K.G.B. agent in London last year.

Russia said today that it would also tighten visa requirements on British government officials traveling to Russia, in response to a similar move announced by Britain on Monday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mikhail Kamynin, said in a statement.

The symmetrical nature of the reply suggested that Russian authorities do not want to escalate the dispute over the poisoning case, which has become a bruising, drawn-out scandal for the Kremlin.

In his first public comments on the tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions, President Vladimir V. Putin said he believed relations with Britain would now “develop normally.”

“It is necessary to measure our actions with common sense, to respect the legitimate rights and interests of partners, and everything will work out in the best way,” Mr. Putin said in remarks carried on state television. “I am sure we will cope with this mini-crisis.”

Mr. Kamynin said the four British Embassy staff members in Moscow had been, in formal diplomatic terms, declared persona non grata, and that they should leave Russia within 10 days, the same conditions the British announced for the Russian diplomats. “From now on, we shall act in a mirror-like fashion in regard to all visa related issues,” he said.

He also said Russia would suspend counterterrorism cooperation between the F.S.B., a successor agency to the K.G.B., and security agencies in Britain.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry suggested on Monday that it was Britain that first articulated a refusal to cooperate with the F.S.B., in response to the murder of Mr. Litvinenko.

Counterterrorism cooperation was stepped up at Russia’s initiative after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when Mr. Putin was the first foreign leader to telephone President Bush to offer assistance. The ties had been seen as a strength in the otherwise somewhat strained relations between Russia and the West. The decision would not affect ties with the United States, however.

Mr. Kamynin also said that Britain’s ambassador to Russia, Tony Brenton, had been summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry and notified of other measures, which were not specified in his public statement.

Finally, he said, Mr. Brenton was told that Russia saw Britain’s expulsion of diplomats as “unfriendly conduct.”

Neither side named the diplomats who were expelled. Britain announced its expulsions on Monday, in response to Russia’s refusal to extradite the accused murderer of Aleksandr V. Litvinenko, who died on Nov. 23 after ingesting the radioactive isotope polonium-210.

Russia’s uncharacteristically subdued response came as the Kremlin is facing a din of criticism from Europe and the United States over the case, and suggested a desire to wind down the dispute, Pavel E. Felgenhauer, a defense columnist at Novaya Gazeta in Moscow, said in a telephone interview.

On Thursday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked for Russia’s “full cooperation” in the extradition request, and the European Union issued a statement supporting Britain.

“A terrible crime was committed on British soil, and Britain has to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice,” Ms. Rice said on the sidelines of a Middle East peace conference in Portugal, Agence France-Presse reported. “It is not in anybody’s interests that you can have a crime committed of this kind and nothing be done about it.”

Mr. Litvinenko had been a vocal critic of Mr. Putin’s leadership, among other things accusing his former employer, the F.S.B., of being behind a series of bombings in Moscow apartment buildings in 1999 that killed more than 300 people all told; the Russian government denies the accusation.

British prosecutors say they have enough evidence to prove that another former K.G.B. agent, Andrei K. Lugovoi, administered the lethal dose of polonium into Mr. Litvinenko’s tea at a meeting last November. But Russian officials say their constitution prohibits extraditing citizens to other countries to stand trial.

Mr. Litvinenko, on his deathbed, accused Mr. Putin of ordering his murder; the Kremlin denies it.

Source: The New York Times

Personal comment: Mr. Putin, stop lying…we all know you ordered the Russian secret service to kill the former spy Litvinenko.

Tags: spy, spies, Russia, diplomacy, GB, UK, U.K., Cold, War

4 Held in Scottish Attack as British See Broader Plot

A vehicle burned on Saturday after it hit a section of Glasgow Airport.

LONDON, Sunday, July 1 — British officials raised the country’s terrorism threat alert to its highest level on Saturday after two men slammed an S.U.V. into entrance doors at Glasgow Airport and turned the vehicle into a potentially lethal fireball.

Less than 38 hours earlier the police uncovered two cars in London rigged to explode with gasoline, gas canisters and nails.

Early Sunday, after a day of fast-moving developments, the London police announced that two people had been arrested in Cheshire, in northwest England, “in connection with the events in London and Scotland.”

The arrests were in addition to those of the two occupants of the blazing car at Glasgow Airport. A witness to the attack said on BBC television that one of the car’s occupants had been ablaze from head to foot, and as he struggled with the police, “was throwing punches and shouting ‘Allah, Allah.’ ”

Britain’s threat level is now at “critical,” meaning another attack is
considered imminent. The threat has not been as high since last year,
after authorities discovered what they called a plot to attack
trans-Atlantic airliners with liquid explosives.

A British security official, who like many other officials who disclosed information insisted on anonymity, said Saturday that the heightened level reflected an assessment that the London and Glasgow cases were “linked in some ways and, therefore, there are clearly individuals who have the capability and intent to carry out further attacks.”

The links relate to the way the London car bombs and Glasgow airport attack were planned, using vehicles and gasoline, the official said.

In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement from Secretary Michael Chertoff saying there were no plans to raise the national threat level because there was “no specific, credible information” suggesting any threat to the United States.

But the federal government took a number of steps, given the events in Britain and the approaching July 4 holiday, to elevate security.

Homeland Security officials said they included additional bomb detection canine teams at airports and behavior-detection squads.

The New York City police said they were monitoring events in London and Scotland and were maintaining the heightened security that began after the discovery of the car bombs in London.

The measures include sending officers into parking garages with sensors that detect the presence of chemical, biological and radiological agents, and closely monitoring tourist areas, including nightclubs, said the department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne.

Although there were questions throughout the day about whether the Glasgow vehicle crashed intentionally, by Saturday night, Sir William Rae, the chief constable of the Strathclyde area around Glasgow, said it was an act of terrorism.

Mr. Rae said one of the two men was found to be wearing a “suspicious device” at the hospital where he was being treated, and the hospital was evacuated. Mr. Rae declined to comment on reporters’ suggestions that the assailant — said to be in critical condition — had been wearing an explosive belt. A person with knowledge of the investigation, however, said that the device was a suicide belt, and also that the car contained propane canisters.

Mr. Rae said the attack at the airport, Scotland’s largest, was linked to the car bombs in London, but he did not elaborate.

The airport in Liverpool was also closed on Saturday, apparently reflecting a fresh area of concern in an increasingly jittery nation.

In July 2005, four suicide bombers killed 52 people on London’s transit system, and another set of attacks failed two weeks later, bringing home to Britain fears of homegrown terrorist attacks among its disenfranchised South Asian population. Witnesses said the two men in the Glasgow attack were South Asian.

In office only since Wednesday, a somber Prime Minister Gordon Brown appeared briefly on national television from 10 Downing Street late Saturday. “I want all British people to be vigilant and I want them to support the police and all the authorities in the difficult decisions that they have to make,” he said. “I know that the British people will stand together, united, resolute and strong.”

Saturday was the first full day of the school summer vacations; thousands of people were awaiting flights in Glasgow. The sight of the dark green Jeep Cherokee smashing into the building and bursting into flames spread panic and terror in the terminal. A Glasgow police spokeswomen, Elisa Dunn, said that five bystanders were injured, and that one was hospitalized for a leg injury, according to The Associated Press.

Hours after the attack, hundreds of passengers remained on stranded airplanes on the tarmac. The authorities said they could not be allowed into the terminal because of potential further dangers.

The events in London and Scotland deepened foreboding among security experts that Britain was confronting a new threat: the use of relatively unsophisticated, homemade explosive devices to spread mayhem.

The alert began early Friday, when the two cars, Mercedes sedans, were found in the central West End theater and nightclub district.

After the midafternoon crash through doors at Glasgow Airport on Saturday, accounts by witnesses gathered by news agencies were confused, but some spoke of the two occupants of the car smashing bottles of gasoline and struggling with police officers and others who tried to restrain them. The man on fire may have immolated himself.

The attack came as London — already worried by the rigged cars — braced for a weekend of high-profile events, including a concert to honor the memory of Diana, Princess of Wales; a Gay Pride March; and the Wimbledon tennis tournament.

The police in the capital stepped up foot patrols as counterterrorism officers hunted suspects linked to the cars found in London.

But Mr. Rae, the Scottish constable, said there had been no intelligence warning of an attack in Glasgow.

Prime Minister Brown, who is himself a Scot, summoned two emergency meetings of the high-level security committee called Cobra to try to come to grips with the attacks. Likewise, in the United States, Mr. Chertoff held so-called principals meetings, involving other cabinet-level officials. And officials with the Transportation Security Administration held a conference call with airport and airline officials from around the United States.

In London, counterterrorism experts suggested that whoever abandoned the two explosives-laden Mercedes might have been what a senior Western official called “less directed from Al Qaeda and more a matter of a homegrown group,” although their plan seemed to be modeled on terrorist attacks in Iraq.

Several experts and officials said the technology behind the London car bombs seemed amateurish. While the attackers apparently tried to detonate the bombs using cellphones, “they didn’t go off because there were not top-grade people putting them together,” one Western official said.

If the plot turns out to be the work of a small, unknown cell, that could raise alarms that Britain’s terrorism threat is broader than the 2,000 suspected radicals known to the authorities. The Western official said British investigators were pursuing several “good leads.”

The attack in Scotland also seemed marked by improvisation.

BAA, the company that runs the airport, said a vehicle “drove into a front door at the check-in area” and “caught fire on impact.”

One witness, Scott Leeson, said the Jeep had sped up to the building at around 30 miles per hour.

“Then the driver swerved the car around so he could ram straight into the door,” the Press Association news agency quoted Mr. Leeson as saying. “He must have been trying to smash straight through.”

Another witness, Lynsey McBean, 26, told the Press Association: “We saw a green Cherokee drive straight into the front door of the airport but it got jammed. They were obviously trying to get it farther inside the airport as the wheels were spinning and smoke was coming from them. One of the men, I think it was the driver, brought out a plastic petrol canister and poured it under the car. He then set light to it.

“At that point a policeman came over, the passenger got out of the car and punched him. At that point I began to run away. But when I looked back several people had run over to try and stop the men.”

There were no public claims of responsibility for the car bombs on Friday, which were uncovered almost by accident when an ambulance crew and traffic wardens separately discovered the sedans.

But a posting on an online forum monitored by the SITE Institute, which tracks jihadist Web sites, asked whether London had been “craving explosions from Al Qaeda” after authorities in June bestowed a knighthood on the author Salman Rushdie, reviled by some radical Muslims for his book “The Satanic Verses.”

No “established link” exists between the knighthood and the car bombs, a British security official said.

The Times of London reported Saturday that the police had warned nightclub operators a few days ago of the threat attack.

The two cars were parked around a corner from each other. The first to be discovered and disarmed was outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in the Haymarket near Piccadilly Circus. The second had been nearby on Cockspur Street leading to Trafalgar Square but towed for a parking infraction about 90 minutes later, the police said.

Sajjan M. Gohel, a security expert, said the police were pursuing a theory that the two car bombs had been designed to explode one after the other — the first to bring people into the street and the second to cause great loss of life. The fact that Thursday night at Tiger Tiger was ladies’ night, he said, recalled a conspiracy in 2004 in which British-born bombers said they wanted to attack women at a nightclub, whom they viewed as promiscuous, in conversations monitored by British intelligence.

Source: The New York Times (by e-mail)

Comment: now the British threat level has been raised to the highest level, it is proven that the British government is expecting further attacks [from Al Qaeda?]. The question now is of course or the recent events in London and in Glasgow (in good old Scotland!) will be followed by other attacks in other Western cities. It looks like the U.S. isn’t expecting attacks in the homeland, though measures have been taken to protect people and buildings from eventual attacks carried out by terrorists.

“In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security issued a
statement from Secretary Michael Chertoff saying there were no plans to
raise the national threat level because there was “no specific,
credible information” suggesting any threat to the United States.
But the federal government took a number of steps, given the events in
Britain and the approaching July 4 holiday, to elevate security.
Homeland Security officials said they included additional bomb
detection canine teams at airports and behavior-detection squads.
The New York City police said they were monitoring events in London and
Scotland and were maintaining the heightened security that began after
the discovery of the car bombs in London.
The measures include sending officers into parking garages with sensors
that detect the presence of chemical, biological and radiological
agents, and closely monitoring tourist areas, including nightclubs,
said the department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne”

technorati tags:attacks, attack, London, New, York, U.S., USA, US, U.S.A., United, States, of, America, homeland, security

Blazing car driven into Glasgow Airport

Glasgow Aiport has been
closed until further notice after a blazing car crashed into the main terminal
building around 3.15pm today. The incident occurred just a day after
a car bomb attack on central London was foiled. A police spokeswoman said it
was too early to say whether the latest incident was terrorist related. However,
Sky News later reported that the incident was being treated as a terrorist
attack. Witnesses said a blazing Cherokee jeep containing two men crashed into
the doors of the terminal building. A man with his clothes on fire got out of
the vehicle and was restrained by passengers. One eyewitness said : “Some
holidaymaker tried to restrain him, then the police came over and wrestled him
to the ground – the fire was burning through his clothes – and finally put him
out with a fire extinguisher.”

Another eyewitness said one
of the men had tried to open the boot of the vehicle but was not successful. “Police
tried to restrain him but the guy was quite strong and he started fighting off
the police,” he said. Eyewitness Fiona Tracey, who had been picking up her
daughter from the airport, said she believed people were injured in the
incident. “There were people injured, because I’ve seen them lying on the
road,” she said. “I was standing next to departures, I heard a great
big massive bang, and then all the folk from departures were running through
arrivals.” A spokesman for the airport’s operators, the British Airports
Authority, said emergency services were at the scene. “A car is on fire at
the entrance to the terminal and there is considerable smoke damage to the
terminal. The terminal has been evacuated as a result of this and all flights
have now been suspended,” the spokesman said. Glasgow Airport is the
busiest of Scotland’s international airports with approximately 8.8 million
passengers a year travelling through it. “This is the start of the busy
summer holiday period, although Saturdays are less busy than week days. But
this will cause disruption and our advice to passengers is to check with their
airline to establish if their flight will be operating.” Two people have
allegedly been arrested by police. Downing Street said that Prime Minister
Gordon Brown was “being kept aware” of the situation in Glasgow and
the Home Office said it was monitoring events, which were being handled by
Strathclyde Police. Brown is to chair a meeting of the Government’s Cobra
emergency contingencies committee this evening to discuss the incident. A Home
Office spokesman said that the official security alert level remains at
“severe”, as it has been for some time. Labour’s shadow justice
minister in Scotland, Margaret Curran, said: “This is obviously a very
serious incident that alerts us all to the threat to our safety and security. “We
are relieved that as yet there seem to be no serious injuries. But our thoughts
are with those who have witnessed this terrible event. We obviously condemn
those who risk the safety of others.” The Queen is in Scotland today for
the inauguration of Scotland’s third Parliament, the first to be under
Nationalist minority control.

Source: The Times (UK).

Comment:

The question now is: is it
a terrorist attack or not? Airports are large symbols of western technology,
and very vulnerable to attacks…

I hope for the British
people it’s not again something that gives a signal of an upcoming wave
of attacks…most people fear attacks in public transportation, airports,…

And dying in an airplane is
certainly not my idea of having a quiet death…

 

technorati tags:Glasgow, airport, Scotland, UK, Great, Britain, Great-Britain, terrorists, attack, car, accident, incident

London Finds Linked Bombs, Al-Qaeda Tactic

The British Police in the West End (London) yesterday. Photo: Shaun Curry/Agence France-Presse–Getty Images.

LONDON, June 29 — London was gripped by a terrorist threat on Friday when the police found two Mercedes sedans packed with gasoline, nails and gas canisters that had been parked near Piccadilly Circus in the bustling West End entertainment district.

The police defused both bombs, but had they exploded “there could have been significant injury or loss of life,” Peter Clarke, Britain’s senior counterterrorism police official, told reporters.

Hours later, Mr. Clarke told another news conference at New Scotland Yard that the second car, illegally parked in Cockspur Street a few hundred yards from the first in the Haymarket, had been rigged like the first, adding, “The vehicles are clearly linked.”

Security experts said that neither the bomb materials nor the cellphone triggering device was particularly sophisticated. Nor, said Sajjan M. Gohel, a counterterrorism expert with the Asia-Pacific Foundation, did the attack “seem to be very well planned.”

But the idea of a multiple attack using car bombs — a departure from the backpack suicide attacks of the London bombings of July 2005 — raised concerns among security
experts that jihadist groups linked to Al Qaeda may have imported tactics more familiar in Iraq.

Both bombs seem to have been discovered by accident.

In the first case, an ambulance crew alerted the police after seeing what it thought was smoke inside a silver-green Mercedes parked outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub on the Haymarket. The police defused an explosive device there by hand in the early morning, but did not reveal the episode until hours later.

Then, after a day of growing tensions and reports of a second bomb, the police confirmed Friday night that they had found a blue Mercedes rigged to explode in a car pound on upscale Park Lane, where it was stowed after being ticketed and towed away. Traffic agents said they had smelled gasoline fumes coming from the vehicle.

The car was towed around 3:30 a.m.,roughly two and a half hours after the discovery of the first vehicle, the police said. If the cars were supposed to explode in spectacular
fashion, the plot had clearly gone awry.

ABC News reported that British security officials said they had seen a “crystal clear” image on a security tape of the driver jumping from the green Mercedes, and that he bore “a close resemblance” to a man arrested in an earlier bomb plot but released for lack of evidence.

A British security official confirmed in an interview on Friday that the authorities were
concerned that the supposed attacker might have been a person already known to the authorities who had slipped out of sight after “crossing the radar” in a separate conspiracy.

In recent weeks, several terrorism suspects who were supposed to be restricted in their
movements by so-called control orders have disappeared, but they most likely fled abroad, the official said.

The attempted bombings, as well as the potential for further violence, posed an immediate challenge to the newly installed prime minister, Gordon Brown, who convened a meeting of Britain’s top security committee — called Cobra, for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A — to assess the severity of the situation.

“As the police and security services have said on so many occasions, we face a serious and continuous threat to our country,” Mr. Brown said. “But this incident does recall the need for us to be vigilant at all times and the public to be alert at any potential incidents.”

In Washington, counterterrorism officials said that they were following the investigation in London closely, but that they had received no credible reports of possible threats inside
the United States, although they urged heightened vigilance with the approach of the Fourth of July holiday.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a bulletin on Friday urging local authorities to step up their watchfulness even though there had been no credible threat reports.

In the course of a jittery day in London, the police barred people andvehicles from Park Lane and urged others to leave adjoining Hyde Park because officers had suspicions, later confirmed, about the car in the underground parking lot.

Fleet Street, leading from central London to the traditional financial district to the east, was also cordoned off, but later reopened. The closings left tracts of central London in gridlock on a busy Friday afternoon when streets are normally packed.

Some Londoners seemed unfazed by the news of the botchedattacks.“It’s something you get used to, living in London,” said Andrew Fowler, a 39-year-old lawyer sipping coffee at an outdoor cafe near Piccadilly. “And given the stance our government made on the war
in Iraq and elsewhere, I think we are just getting used to being a target.”

The alert, which closed off streets around the Haymarket, brought some people out of nearby offices to find out what was going on.

“It’s only when I got to work that I realized what was happening,” said Renee Anderson, 32, a New Zealander from her country’s nearby diplomatic mission. “I feel surprisingly all right about it. We all kind of thought, ‘Well, you could be hit by a bus anyway.’ ”

News of the developments broke over Britain’s breakfast tables when a police spokesman said explosives experts had discovered a “potentially viable explosive device” in a vehicle. British news organizations quoted witnesses as saying police officers had been seen
removing what appeared to be propane gas cylinders and a large number of nails from the car.

Sky News quoted a witness who said the car had been driven erratically before it collided with garbage bins, and that the driver had run off. Mr. Clarke, the counterterrorism official, could not confirm that version of events.

The Tiger Tiger nightclub was packed with hundreds of people at the time the first bomb
was discovered. One woman at the club, Rajeshree Patel, told the BBC that the Mercedes had all its doors open and its headlights on. “I think there would have been a lot of fatalities” if the car had exploded, she said. “There were approximately 500 people inside Tiger Tiger at the time.”

The presence of gas cylinders recalled a 2004 terrorist plot called the “Gas Limos Project,” in which Dhiren Barot, a British Muslim accused of being a leading Al Qaeda figure, had planned to use limousines packed with gas cylinders to blow up buildings. In a
39-page planning document, Mr. Barot, who was sentenced in November to a minimum of 40 years in prison, recommended the use of gas cylinders because they were highly destructive and easy to obtain.

In another plot, terrorists were said to have planned to attack the Ministry of Sound, one of London’s biggest nightclubs, using a fertilizer bomb.

Haymarket is in an area of bars, shops and theaters that draws tens of thousands of visitors and revelers. Two theaters on the Haymarket canceled Friday night performances.

The discovery was made one day after the new prime minister, Mr. Brown,
formed his first government and close to the second anniversary of the bombings of July 7, 2005, in which four suicide bombers killed 52 people on the London subway system.

The counterterrorism command, headed by Mr. Clarke, has led several major investigations into suspected jihadist conspiracies that have proliferated in Britain
since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In those investigations, suspected terrorists have been accused by the police of planning to use a variety of weapons, including the poison ricin, fertilizer bombs and liquid explosives to attack an array of targets like a shopping mall, a nightclub and airplanes on trans-Atlantic routes.

Jack Straw, who was appointed justice minister by Mr. Brown, said government members had been told about the discovery several hours before the police statement, which was made public as the morning rush hour got under way.

There was no immediate change in the threat level declared by the British authorities. According to the Web site of MI5, the British domestic security service, the current level stands at severe, meaning an attack is “highly likely,” as it has been since
August 2006.

Some Londoners said Friday’s alert heightened the sense of suspicion surrounding people of different backgrounds.

With the latest scare, said Sanjay Karsan, 22, a Briton of Indian descent,
“I’m worrying that if I walk up that road, they’re going to suspect me.”

Source: The New York Times

Comment: I personally don’t hope that a new wave of terroristic attacks will commence. God save the Queen…

Closer to home (at least for me):

Already a few minutes the Belgian quality newspaper De Standaard joined other newspapers around the world in spreading the news through it’s website, in an article titled “Two car bombs defused in London”. It seems that the extremely-well manned editioral office of the newspaper kept an eye on the most important newspapers in the English-speaking world, otherwise it wouldn’t have been possible to write an article this fast.

Britain: united you are strong! Watch out for these suspicious cars, people who act weird,…keep an eye on eachother, and you might have a chance to get away from the terrorism. Everybody, keep your eyes open!

technorati tags:London, United, Kingdom, UK, Great, Britain, West, End, terrorism, attacks, car, bombs

British Police finds explosive device in London (UK)

LONDON, June 29 — British police said they discovered an explosive device in a car abandoned outside a nightclub in the West End theater and entertainment district of central London early today and began a terrorism investigation.

The police said they had found significant quantities of gasoline, propane cylinders and nails in the car, a silver-green Mercedes, which had now been made safe.

Parts of central London were cordoned off after the incident, near the landmark Piccadilly Circus area, the police said.

In a press briefing, Peter Clarke, head of Britain’s counterterrorism command, said the explosive materials had had the potential to cause “significant injury or loss of life.”

Many other questions were met with his refusal to speculate during the early stages of an investigation. Evidence so far was said to include closed circuit television footage, along with witness accounts, which are emerging in news coverage. Mr. Clarke urged those people and any other witnesses to call a hotline.

Mr. Clarke said the British authorities had had no intelligence that an attack was coming. The police were alerted after people working for the ambulance service were called to a separate incident in the area and noticed what they thought was smoke coming from the car, Mr. Clarke said. “The threat from terrorism is here, it’s real, it’s enduring,” Mr. Clarke said. “Life goes on.”

Britain’s newly-installed prime minister, Gordon Brown, urged citizens to be vigilant, particularly “over the next few days”. He also ordered a meeting of so-called Cobra group of high-level officials — the Cobra name means Cabinet Office Briefing Room A — to assess the severity of the incident.

“As the police and security services have said on so many occasions, we face a serious and continuous threat to our country,” Mr. Brown said. “But this incident does recall the need for us to be vigilant at all times and the public to be alert at any potential incidents.”

“I will stress to the Cabinet that the vigilance must be maintained over the next few days,” he said.

Sky News quoted an eyewitness as saying the car had been driven erratically before it collided with garbage bins and the driver ran off, although the police could not confirm this report.

The car was abandoned close to a night-spot called Tiger Tiger, television news footage showed, and police used a remote-controlled robot to approach it. The car was later loaded onto a removal truck.

The apparent use of gas cylinders recalled a terror plot allegedly thwarted in 2004 when Dhiren Barot, a British Muslim, was said to have been planning to use limousines packed with gas cylinders to blow up buildings.

The discovery was made one day after Mr. Brown formed his first government and it comes close to the second anniversary of the July 7 bombings of 2005 when four suicide bombers killed 52 people on the London Underground, the London subway system.

The incident therefore represented a first challenge to Mr. Brown in the handling of apparent terrorism cases after a decade in government overseeing the nation’s finances as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He took over from the former prime minister, Tony Blair, two days ago.

“Police were called to reports of a suspicious vehicle parked in the Haymarket, shortly before 2 a.m. this morning,” a police statement said. Haymarket is part of the area of bars, shops and theaters that draws in tens of thousands of visitors and revelers.

“As a precautionary measure the immediate area was cordoned off while the vehicle was examined by explosives officers,” the police statement said.

“They discovered what appeared to be a potentially viable explosive device. This was made safe. The Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command has launched an investigation.”

The counterterrorism command, headed by Mr. Clarke, is the police unit that has dealt with several major investigations into alleged jihadist conspiracies that have proliferated in this country since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

In those investigations, suspected terrorists have been accused by the police of planning to use a variety of weapons including the poison ricin, fertilizer bombs, and liquid explosives to attack an array of targets like a shopping mall, a nightclub and trans-Atlantic airplanes.

Jack Straw, who was appointed justice minister in Mr. Brown’s new government, said government members had been told about the incident several hours before the police statement, which was made public as the morning rush hour got under way.

There was no immediate change in the level of threat perceived by the British authorities. According to the Web site of MI5, the British domestic security service, the current level stands at severe, meaning an attack is “highly likely”, unchanged since August 2006.

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, a former head of MI5, said last year that the British authorities were monitoring 1,600 people in 200 suspected terror cells.

Source: The New York Times

Comment: I truly hope that the British don’t need to experience a new gulf of terrorism, not like the attacks in the British “Tube” (well-known, not-officially synonym for London’s Underground). For God’s sake, Mr. Bush, this time we need you. Kick those terrorists back to Afghanistan and Iraq (and Iran? I don’t hope so…)…do your duty in the global war on terrorism.

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