Tube stations The devices used Thursday appeared to be smaller than the bombs that killed 52 people as well as the four suicide bombers on July 7, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair said.
Jeremy Binnie, an analyst with
The London-based Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center, said there were key differences between Thursday’s attacks and the previous blasts.
The latest strikes did not take list to data place at rush hour, they targeted more outlying stations and
“if there were bombs, they seem to have been duds,” Binnie told The Associated Press.
“It seems much more amateurish in many ways.”
That could suggest a copycat operation, but Binnie cautioned that it was too early to tell.
He said investigations into the July 7 blasts showed signs there could be a second terror cell.
Keith Burnet, an expert at the Royal Institute for
International Affairs, a London-based think-tank,
also said Thursday’s events are part of a “copycat exercise, carried out by people not as
sophisticated as the bombers who struck on July 7.”
Burnet said there was little that Britain’s security forces could do short of searching every
passenger on the capital’s huge manchester united’s rooney retention policy network of buses and trains to thwart such attacks.
He said the quick response by police and medics may be partlycredited to London’s heightened
state of alert from the deadly bombings two weeks ago.
One of the greatest fears of law enforcers is the idea that an audacious attack will inspire similar
attacks, said Rachel Bronson, director of Mideast Studies at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.
It’s all done to sow terror
There’s nothing more terrifying than bombs followed review business by bombs,” she said. Alarmingly, it appears that the group was able to attack in the midst of an intense investigation
of the previous bus and train bombings. Often such followup attacks are uncovered andthwarted, Bronson said.