According to some witnesses the light metallic green Mercedes saloon was driven erratically and crashed into bins near a nightclub. The driver was then seen running away.
Oh, and The Haymarket is not exactly a quiet road, though it probably is at 4am.
The Haymarket runs parallel to Lower Regent Street and together the two roads form a one-way system, Lower Regent Street taking northbound traffic and Haymarket taking southbound traffic. The two roads are classified as part of the A4 road which runs from central London to Avonmouth near Bristol.
Wikipedia just added an article on the 2007 Haymarket Bomb Plot. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
Looks like we've settled on 2am, which would indeed be busier than 4am.
Although I'm still not sure why The Haymarket would be a target when Piccadilly is just around the corner and is always much busier.
The witnesses just report that it was being driven erratically and that the driver ran away after crashing into some bins. The erratic driving could well be down to the driver not being familiar with the car combined with them being wired on adrenaline (which does funny things to your fine motor control) - the fact that he abandoned the vehicle and scarpered after a mild prang supports the idea that he wasn't exactly the coolest cucumber in the fridge when push came to shove.
The cops haven't released any details of the detonation mechanism yet, so whilst this could have been a suicide run targetting jahiliyyi clubbers it could also have been intended to pre-position a bomb that was intended to wreak havoc at a later, busier time.
Even if it was intended to be a suicide run (and really, what's the point of suicide bombing a soft target?) absent tracking the bomber(s) down and getting the info from them, there's no way for us to know where they were targetting.
Regards Luke -- #include witty_sig.h
This is all purest speculation of course.
No one seems to have commented on the fact that propane cannisters make very bad bombs. The steel casing is extremely thick and you have to leave it to burn for a long time before it explodes.
If the plan was to set fire to the car and then wait for the propane to go up, or even just to fill the car and light a match, that was only ever marginally likely to work.
Pedestrian traffic peaks around 11pm-midnight in that part of London, with a smaller peak at chucking out time, which is anywhere between 2-4pm.
But if you wanted to leave a bomb near Whitehall or Westminster - both of which are very close - the chances of not being discovered are not great.
In no way does this make any sense, except possibly as a message for Gordo.
If you want maximum carnage you wait for the weekend.
If you want a more high profile target, you don't use a high profile Merc with windows that everyone can see into as they walk by.
Meanwhile everyone is - conveniently - already assuming this is an Islamic radical plot, based so far on no real evidence to support that idea.
It still looks a bit Keystone Kops vs Inept Terrorists though.
Considering the hysteria, and considering how easy it is for someone with even half a brain to do a whole lot of damage, actions are some way short of the political rhetoric about them.
This is a good thing. But it suggests that it's the political rhetoric that has become uncalibrated, and not so much that scary people are working hard at trying to live up to it.
Police scaremongering against I-do-not-know-how-to-build-a-damned-bomb terrorists...
Now seriously .. how is the press buying that with 60 gallons and "metralla" in a car you can make tens of casualties...
are they joking? pissed? Stupid? insane?
The only way to kill 10 people with this sort of artifacts it is if half of them were inside the car and the other five very close to the windows...but like having sex ont he windows of the car.
The press really keeps on surprissing me.. really.. flabbergasted... that's the word.. flabbergasted... geee
A pleasure I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude
Now just what mark would that be? When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind
My guess is if it really had the mark of Al Qaeda" it would have been succesful and Larry Johnson seems to be on to something calling them "yuppie terrorists".
Let's have a collection of silly media content:
BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner said simultaneous, co-ordinated bombs have been historically a distinguishing feature of al-Qaeda attacks.
Because no one has ever had that idea before.
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". Earlier he had said the Haymarket incident "resonated" with previous cases.
Earlier he had said the Haymarket incident "resonated" with previous cases.
Resonated? How? Which cases? Maybe my memory is going, but I don't remember any Merc-based car bombs recently. There was that Barot nutter last year, who was another off-the-peg fantasists who was never in any danger of getting the tools or materials together for an attack.
Good to know that the discovery of a second potential bomb is troubling though.
Good progress is said to have already been made in the search of CCTV footage, with unconfirmed reports suggesting police may have an image of a suspect leaving the vehicle left outside the Tiger Tiger club in Haymarket.
Which means they may have fuzzy lined video that's completely useless for identifying anyone. If they have anything at all.
I can imagine someone reading soemthing from a weird web page about resistence, oprresion and evil violent pseudoanarchism... tooking and artifact which is like an hyubrid of a moltov cocktail and plastic explosive with metralla... and using it with teh "al-qaeda brand"...
After one week of training , a brand-new young ETA activist knows more about explosives that those nerds.
The thing that really made me boggle yesterday was a "Terrorism expert" on Sky who told us with all seriousness that the terrorist websites even had helplines for when you had trouble building your bomb!
which raised the question what music do they have when you're on hold? and have they outsourced that to India which with the misunderstandings that always come with that are causing the current chain of failed bombs? Life should consist in at least fifty percent pure waste of time, and the rest doing what you please.
(Might be worth the security services ringing this number and asking to speak to Osama as well) ;-) Life should consist in at least fifty percent pure waste of time, and the rest doing what you please.
Bottom line here, as a wise man once told me. You can drink or you can drive, but you can't drink and drive. And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg
