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London terror attacks

Small bombs created carnage

	Graphic: A look at the sequence of attacks.

LONDON - The London bombs that exploded Thursday morning weighed less than 10 pounds each and were small enough to be carried in a backpack, police concluded Friday.

Beyond that, piecing together the evidence promised to be a long, arduous task.

Police called it "combing the city by fingertip" and noted the hardships of attempting to study every piece of wreckage from four explosions - three underground and one on a usually busy city street - while trying to remove the dead.

Experts say Thursday's attacks had all the hallmarks of an al-Qaida strike, and authorities were gathering evidence on the ground and investigating a purported claim of responsibility.

Sir Ian Blair, commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police, said no arrests had been made but officials have "lots and lots" of leads.

Home Secretary Charles Clarke, the Cabinet minister responsible for law and order, said it was a "strong possibility" that al-Qaida or a sympathetic group had carried out the attack.

In Washington, current and former American counterterrorism officials said they were taking seriously an Internet claim by a little-known group calling itself the Secret Organization of al-Qaida in Europe that it staged the attacks.

The Associated Press reported that an unnamed U.S. law enforcement official said authorities had vague information from Abu Farraj al-Libbi, reputedly No. 3 in the al-Qaida terror network, that al-Qaida was seeking to mount an attack similar to the 2004 train bombings in Madrid.

Libbi was arrested by Pakistani agents on May 2. The information contained no specifics about location or timing, the official said.

Al-Qaida is a different terror network now than it was in 2001, when leaders commanded a more hierarchical, well-organized collection of cells.

Those responsible for the London attacks may have been British citizens with no formal terrorism training or direct links to al-Qaida commanders, said Alex Standish, the editor of Jane's Intelligence Digest.

"Al-Qaida is now an ideology. It's moved beyond being a structural organization," he said. "All one has to do to form an al-Qaida cell is to get together with a group of like-minded individuals and say, "We are going to start an al-Qaida cell.'... If one is prepared to carry out an attack in the name of al-Qaida, one becomes an al-Qaida operative."

The four bombs were left on the floor of Underground subway trains and either a seat or the floor of the No. 30 bus that was ripped apart in the Bloomsbury neighborhood, said Assistant Police Commissioner Andy Hayman.

Law enforcement officials declined to respond to questions about a U.S. official's statement that evidence indicating timers were used was found in the debris. London police also played down the possibility the devices were detonated by remote control using cell phones - the method used in the commuter train bombings last year in Madrid - as cell phones work poorly on the London Underground.

Ten pounds is a relatively small bomb, although a blast's power depends more on the type of explosive than the amount. The 10 bombs that killed 191 people on commuter trains in Madrid averaged 22 pounds each; the bombs that killed 33 bystanders and 12 suicide attackers at five targets in Casablanca, Morocco, two years ago were 18 to 22 pounds each.

Spanish authorities said they had dispatched to London a team of explosives experts responsible for the forensic analysis of the Madrid bombs to determine if Thursday's bombers were part of the same network of Islamic radicals blamed for the March 11, 2004, explosions in Madrid.

Hayman said investigators had so far obtained little detailed forensic information on the bombs. Their investigation has been hindered by the inaccessibility of one of the wrecked trains, 70 feet below street level, he said.

Bodies were still trapped in the mangled Picadilly line train between the King's Cross and Russell Square stations, the site where at least 21 people were killed.

Rescuers got all the survivors out in the hours after the blast but decided not to go back to remove the dead or recover evidence until they can shore up the tunnel, which sustained structural damage and may be unsafe, said Blair, the police commissioner. At the same time, dangerous fumes fill the gap where the torn-up train is buried, asbestos floats about and the site is overrun with rats.

Detectives also have to comb thousands of hours of tape recorded by the British capital's ubiquitous closed-circuit TV cameras, said Charles Shoebridge, a security analyst and former counterterrorism intelligence officer.

London's train stations are monitored by 1,800 cameras, and there are more than 6,000 watching the capital's Underground subway network. Cameras also have been installed on some London buses.

"Most important is the forensic evidence," Clarke told the British Broadcasting Corp. "We are looking for a small number of evil needles in a very big haystack."

Information from the Associated Press, Knight Ridder Newspapers, New York Times and Washington Post was used in this report.

[Last modified July 9, 2005, 01:02:12]