LONDON – Striking with stunning speed against the previous day’s mass-transit bombers, security forces here Friday shot dead one man inside a subway, arrested another, staged a string of dramatic raids and released photos of four men they believe carried out the attacks.
The startling developments came as a group claiming affiliation with al-Qaida claimed responsibility for Thursday’s synchronized blasts, which caused no injuries but spread new panic through this city two weeks after bombings killed 56 and injured 700.
Tempering relief at the breakthroughs was the knowledge that some, if not all, the bombers who struck a bus and three train cars on the London Underground remain on the loose.
Equally sobering were the questions swirling around Friday morning’s shooting. Eyewitnesses said heavily armed plainclothes police chased a tall man of South Asian appearance into a South London subway car and shot him pointblank as they screamed at passengers, “Get out! Get out!”
“They pushed him to the floor, bundled on top of him and unloaded five shots into him,” eyewitness Mark Whitby told BBC News.
Human rights and Muslim groups urged the government to clarify why the suspect was killed rather than detained, particularly since security sources reportedly said he wasn’t one of the four bombers.
“If they had good reasons for shooting the person dead, those reasons must be made public urgently … for police to retain trust within the Muslim community,” said Sher Khan, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, a national umbrella group.
Britain’s 1.6 million Muslims, most of South Asian heritage, have faced numerous bias attacks since the July 7 attacks by four suspected suicide bombers, all Muslim and three of Pakistani ancestry. Many Muslims fear further discrimination under proposed new anti-terror laws. London police Friday also called for expanded counterterrorism powers.
London Police Commissioner Ian Blair said the slain man, whose identity wasn’t released, was “directly linked” to the bombings. “Any death is deeply regrettable but … the man was challenged and refused to obey police instructions,” Blair said in a news conference here.
Police had followed the man from a house they’d been watching in connection with Thursday’s blasts. He jumped a turnstile and darted into the train car, eyewitnesses said. He was wearing a padded coat, despite temperatures of 72 degrees. Witnesses gave conflicting accounts of whether he had wires coming from his back or carried a knapsack. Bombers in both Thursday’s and the July 7 attacks carried explosives in knapsacks.
The man was killed at the Stockwell tube station. Police Friday arrested another suspect in the Stockwell neighborhood, and also detained his wife and daughter. They didn’t say if the arrested man was among the four alleged bombers whose faces were made public Friday, with urgent appeals for the public to call in tips but keep their distance from the men.
The photos, which were stills from closed-circuit television cameras at the blast sites, show four young men wearing casual Western clothes. One was running from the Oval tube station shortly after the explosion there, wearing a sweat shirt reading “New York.” The sweat shirt was found later in the nearby Brixton neighborhood.
Inspectors suspect the men may have intended to be suicide bombers but fled after their homemade explosives failed to fully detonate.
Associated Press
A bomb disposal robot is prepared outside a house raided by police Friday in the Harrow Road area of London during the hunt for those connected with Thursday’s bombing attempts.
Associated Press
One of the pictures released Friday by Scotland Yard shows one of four men police want to question in the attempted suicide attacks.
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