London – Police radically revised their reports on the timing of the deadly blasts that tore through the London Underground, saying Saturday that the bombs were detonated just seconds apart – not 26 minutes apart as first reported.
Those three explosions Thursday, along with another an hour later on a double-decker bus, were so intense that none of the 49 known dead has yet been identified.
Many bodies still lay buried in a rat-infested subway tunnel, and frantic relatives begged for word about others still missing in the worst attack on London since World War II. Police indicated that as many as 50 more victims were unaccounted for. At least 700 people were injured in Thursday’s bombings.
In a sign of the continued state of alert, police evacuated 20,000 people from Birmingham’s central entertainment district Saturday night after intelligence indicated a “substantial threat,” said Stuart Hyde, assistant chief constable of West Midlands Police.
He said the alert was not likely connected to the subway and bus bombings. A controlled explosion to disarm a suspicious object was carried out on a Birmingham bus, and officers concluded there was no explosive device.
Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, the alleged mastermind of last year’s Madrid, Spain, railway bombings who also goes by the name Abu Musab al-Suri, has emerged as a suspect in the London attacks, according to unidentified investigators cited in The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph and the Mail today.
Nasar, a Syrian fugitive suspected of being al-Qaeda’s operations chief in Europe, allegedly played a key role in setting up an al-Qaeda structure in Spain and was indicted there in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S.
Deputy Assistant Police Commissioner Brian Paddick said the near-simultaneous nature of the attacks Thursday indicated timers – not suicide bombers – set off the explosions. He cautioned, however, that the investigation was in an early stage and nothing had been ruled out.
Paddick also said the explosives used in the attack were sophisticated.
“It is high explosive. That would tend to suggest that it is not homemade explosive,” he said. “But whether it is military explosive, whether it is commercial explosive, whether it is plastic explosive, we don’t want to say at this stage.”
Investigators repeated their assertion that the bombings bore the signature of al-Qaeda, the terrorism network blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon.
“It will be some time before this job is completed, and it will be done with all the necessary dignity to the deceased,” said Andy Trotter of the British Transport Police.
As Britain’s biggest criminal investigation gathered momentum, Scotland Yard was joined over the weekend by teams of Spanish antiterrorism experts who helped capture some of those responsible for a similar attack on Madrid’s commuter rail system in March 2004.
The gravest concern is that the terrorists are still at large and preparing to strike again, as they attempted to do in Spain. The police also are operating with the grim knowledge that such terrorists, once cornered, usually refuse to be taken alive and would probably attempt to take as many police and bystanders with them as possible.
According to one senior European counterterrorism official, Madrid police knew much more at this point in their investigation because one of the bombs left on a train failed to detonate, giving police an abundance of leads.
Transit officials originally said the blasts occurred over a 26-minute span, but computer software that tracked train locations and electric circuits later determined the first blast shattered the rush-hour commute at 8:50 a.m in Aldgate station in east London, with the next two erupting within 50 seconds.
The bus explosion, near a subway entrance, was nearly an hour later and killed 13 people.
Scotland Yard has declined to issue a list of people unaccounted for. Police said Saturday they were looking into more than 1,000 missing-person reports, although they do not believe more than 50 of them are connected to the bombings, suggesting the death toll will remain below 100.
More than 20 people injured in the blasts remained in critical condition, and an unknown number of bodies remained in the Russell Square subway tunnel, where heat, dust and dangerous conditions slowed crews trying to reach the corpses. Many London subway lines run more than 100 feet below ground.
“It is a very harrowing task,” said police Detective Jim Dickie. “Most of the victims have suffered intensive trauma, and by that I mean there are body parts as well as torsos.”
Many of those who worked to recover bodies had done the same work after December’s tsunami in the Indian Ocean.
Forensics experts were relying on fingerprints, dental records and DNA analysis to identify the victims. To help with DNA matches, police were asking for hair samples from those believed to be family members of some victims.
Riders were returning to Underground stations, but warily and in smaller numbers.
“Everyone’s looking around a little bit more,” student William Palmer, 23, said at the Chancery Lane subway stop.
