Terror attacks on heart of London


Blogosphere kicks into overdrive.

I saw what may be the first almost real-time use of vision from a videophone to cover a major international event on the TV tonight, showing ambulances arriving at a London hospital with casualties from the London blast on the Tube.

It is amazing how swiftly the UK's bloggers have shifted into high gear to give so many angles on the story. Their personal accounts have been supplied with the aid of still camera phones, videophones, wifi notebooks and PDAs, desktop PCs (at work, many of them), to Flickr, blogs, newspapers, TV and radio via direct upload, emails and text mesages. Truly, if there was an example of how wireless mobility and personal electronic publishing can be brought to bear with laser-like intensity for a single event, then this must be it. Even with the failure of several networks to cope, webservers falling over, and a reported takeover by the police of some communications services for emergency traffic, the news is still getting through with remarkable speed. It makes the Live8's 28 million SMSs look somewhat pale in many ways.

I have spent the last couple of hours trawling the net and bloggers for news tips for the late night crew on the newsdesk at the paper. The guys there have done a great job all things considered. They must have been just about to put the first edition to bed when news broke.

Judging by early reports, at least 50-60 people must have been killed, although Wikipedia reports just about 13 at the moment -- but this is sure to rise. (Sky News later reported 45 dead and 1000 injured based on information from a "reliable, but unofficial source")

The terrorists would have thought that with all the police in Scotland to protect just eight men, that London would be a soft target. But it seems, based on eyewitness reports posted to BBC's news site, that the British police had at least two hours warning because they started to scour the Underground at least as early as 7am, delaying passengers.

I was struck by how the terrorists again used classic special forces tactics. Namely, kick off an explosion that does enough damage to herd people into a kill zone where the main charges are then set off. In this case, panicked Underground commuters were told by security staff to get on buses, which they crowded on to and then at least one exploded (although there were early reports of three buses hit). Al Qaeda did much the same thing in the Bali blast, herding patrons out of the nightclub and into the radius of the bigger, more devastating truck bomb.

The big question now for France is where are the bombs around Paris? If this was inspired in part by a decision to attack the winning Olympics 2012 city, then there may have been two Al Qaeda ops running -- and the other would be in Paris.

On the other hand, the timing of the Olympics announcement last night and events today -- given the G8 meeting got underway at about the same time in Gleneagles, Scotland as the blasts struck -- may just be coincidence. But Chirac won't know that until his security services have thoroughly cleansed the city of any suspicious packages and checked for any suspicious travellers.

Posted: Thu - July 7, 2005 at 11:25 PM          

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