Brits thwart attempted bombing in Picadilly Circus June 29, 2007
Posted by daveintexas in Current Events, terrorist hemorrhoids.trackback
No intel. No warning. No infiltration of a terrorist cell or intercepted communications. They found this thing because they were lucky. A car loaded with explosive gas cylinders and nails parked next to The Haymarket. An ambulance crew noticed smoke coming from the car, and called it in.
Picadilly is crowded with shops and restaurants. Even at 1:30 in the morning, it’s a busy place.
This was weird:
Early photographs of the silver Mercedes showed a canister, bearing the words “patio gas,” indicating it was propane gas, next to the car. The back door was open with blankets spilling out.
Tank of propane next to the car, and an open back door? WTF?
Doesn’t make sense. But that doesn’t erase how potentially lethal this thing was.
UPDATE: ace tells me they apparently crashed the car and screwed up the detonator, and the moron terrorist might have been trying to set it off with fire. His update is here, and HotAir has it too. Poosibly a home grown moron who didn’t go to AQ bomb school. Luck.
Luck is not a strategy for dealing with terrorism. Oh, and Circus is Latin for circle.
I knew somebody would want to know that.
UPDATE 2: They found another one. And the first car had two cell phone detonators, both numbers called twice.
Dave in Texas 
The Brits were lucky that this terrorist was so inept.
That was actually me.
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What’s that saying?
They only have to be lucky once.
We have to be lucky all the time.
Have read but not confirmed (link in comment #4) that a cop may have jumped in the car and removed or dismantled a triggering device. That took some big brass ones, and may have saved a lot of people.
Another thought. Why is this happening in Britan and not here? I’m amazed that as of yet we haven’t had something like this happen on our soil. Not that I’d want something like this to happen but it seems to me that it would be easier to pull something like that off in the U.S.
Because Britain is stuffed full of unassimilated Pakistanis. When they come of age, they go back to Pakistan and marry their cousins. So generations pass and they stay Pakistani.
This as opposed to most other ethnic groups who, at the very least, marry into British-born examples of their ethnic type and, over time, become increasingly Britishized.
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