I am aware that gas canisters can be explosive under certain conditions. For example, liable to explode if they get too hot during a fire. The wording used in this report and others would indicate that this is not really a bomb threat and it is not linked to a terrorist threat. If this was a test for the new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, she's failed it already because Jack Straw who is the new Minister of Justice and Lord Chancellor (and it has nothing to do with his department at all) has grabbed the media attention.
According to Sky News as of 2.45 pm, the car contained "significant amounts of petrol, nail and gas cylinders" and if it had gone off "it would have caused signicifcant injuries or loss of life".
ReplyDeleteBut our jailhouse lawyer tells us "that this is not really a bomb threat"! I have been trying, really trying, to think of an innocent explanation. The best I could come up with was the notion that perhaps it was a piece of post-modernist performance art on its way to the Tate Modern. It failed to convince, so I have turned my attention to the more pressing question of whether or not our host is, or is not, the stupidest blogger in the West?
A case of bad driving not terrorism.
ReplyDeleteThe BBC report says that the car contained gas canisters, nails, petrol and gas.
Should have waited for further developments.
Most probably local criminal vedettas rather than international terrorism
ReplyDelete"But a Westminster source said the device was believed to be relatively small and made of some type of home-made explosive."
ReplyDeleteThe suggested use of HME to make what other reports have described as a viable device would tend to point towards the following: improvised bomb consisting of detonator and primary charge, intended to explode within the vehicle and thus trigger the secondary explosion of the petrol and/or gas aboard. Nails are there to create maimum carnage and mayhem as shrapnel.
Alternatively, the car belongs to a pissed up roofer. The boot contains his tool bag, loads of nails, a couple of gas bottles for his tar boiler, a fuel can for when the car runs out of juice (due to dodgy instrument panel) and a small bomb he found when he repaired the roof of his local mosque/synagogue/chapel/other place of worship.
Yes, the goverment (in general) have an Orwellian desire to make us feel threatened but, and trust me on this, they don't want bombs (or anything like them) turning up in Central London again. If it was a Cunning Plan, it would have been somewhere like Manchester or Birmingham this time around. Not everything in the media is fabricated - likewise, the journos ill be trying to hang dubious flesh on the bare bones of the story the MetPol press officers will have provided so far.