London authorities launched a massive manhunt yesterday for suspects in a foiled double car-bombing that could have killed hundreds in the heart of the city – and cops think they know exactly whom they’re looking for.
British police have a “crystal clear” photo of the driver who left an explosives-packed Mercedes outside a Piccadilly Circus nightclub before disappearing, ABC News reported yesterday.
He bears “a close resemblance” to a man arrested in a previous bomb plot, masterminded by al Qaeda operative Dhiren Barot, that targeted New York as well as London.
Barot, an Indian-born Briton, was convicted last November in London after admitting he planned to blow up the New York Stock Exchange and other targets with various weapons, including stretch limos filled with propane tanks to be used as car bombs.
The Barot associate, who resembles the man captured on the surveillance camera yesterday, was released for lack of evidence, ABC News reported.
But Barot’s master plan, which he wrote up as a plan of action to al Qaeda’s leadership, bears an eerie resemblance to what was uncovered yesterday.
Police said the back seat of the Mercedes held 33 gallons of gasoline, several propane and gas cylinders and a large quantity of nails that would have become shrapnel.
An hour after the car was discovered outside the Piccadilly Circus club, a “very similar” Mercedes bomb was found a few hundred yards away in an underground parking lot on Cockspur Street, which runs between Haymarket and Trafalgar Square.
Security experts said that if the car bombs found yesterday had been ignited, they would have created enormous fireballs, followed by shock waves forming a killing zone at least 400 yards in diameter.
The Piccadilly Circus bomb alone would have killed hundreds of people in the club, Tiger Tiger, and along the streets of London’s theater district.
Barot’s terrorist cell had planned to leave their limo bombs in underground parking lots beneath major hotels and office buildings.
During Barot’s trial, it was revealed that the how-to manual he wrote, “The Gas Limos Project,” proposed packing gas cylinders and 10-liter cans of nails into car bombs.
“Estimated casualties to be hundreds, if the building collapses, inshallah [God willing],” Barot wrote.
Barot, now serving 30 years in prison, envisioned detonating the explosives with grenades or pipe bombs.
But in the Mercedes at Piccadilly Circus, investigators found a cellphone – which officials believe was the detonation device.
British officials said there was no specific warning that the car bomb attack – similar to those used in Iraq – was imminent.
“There is no intelligence whatsoever that we were going to be attacked in this way,” said the national counterterrorism coordinator, deputy assistant commissioner Peter Clarke.
But police alerted nightclubs across Britain weeks ago that they could be terrorist targets, The Times of London said today.
A 53-page document alerted clubs to threats, saying car bombs were “one of the most effective weapons in the terrorists’ arsenal.”
Al Qaeda has targeted “decadent” nightclubs in the past – most spectacularly in the bomb attacks in Bali, Indonesia, in 2002, which killed 202 people.
The timing of the plot is also being investigated. It comes shortly before the second anniversary of the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings that killed 52 people in London and just after the installation of a new prime minister, Gordon Brown.
A group of men tied to the July 7 plot were jailed in April for planning to bomb a nightclub.
With Post Wire Services