Londoners were shocked but not surprised by Thursday's bombings. They may be determined to carry on as normal, but terror is now part of their daily lives, writes Lynne O'Donnell in London
London yesterday shook a defiant fist at its enemies. Shocked, sickened and angered by terrorist bombings that have so far claimed more than 50 lives, Londoners signalled that theirs is a city which will not be cowed.
Long used to dealing with the horrors of twisted imaginations - from Hitler's Blitz to the worst that the Irish Republican Army could throw at them - Londoners showed, in the wake of the latest atrocity to be visited on their home, that the city will endure and thrive.
The death toll from Thursday's four bombs climbed as victims succumbed to their injuries and rescue workers continued to search for bodies in the tunnels of the London Underground rail system.
Speculation mounted that at least one of the explosions, on the upper deck of a London bus, had been detonated by a suicide bomber, although security sources said investigators had yet to find telltale signs, such as limbs or a severed head.
Senior police and leaders of the country's large Muslim community called for calm amid growing evidence that the attacks were the work of religious fanatics fuelled by a hatred that turns all, regardless of colour or creed, into the enemy.
The Union Jack flew at half mast on public buildings and members of the royal family did the rounds of hospitals, visiting the injured in their beds and offering condolences to the bereaved. Surveillance helicopters thudded across an overcast sky and the sirens of ambulances and police cars punctured the city's calm as workers stoically got back on trains and climbed aboard buses to make their way to work. Firms in the City of London financial district provided shuttle services to ensure that business carried on as usual.
"This is a city that carries on; it's the Blitz mentality," said a woman in her 30s as she stepped off a red double-decker in central London. "The term 'stiff upper lip' doesn't apply to any other nationality, and it doesn't apply to the British for no reason."
Indeed, there was little physical evidence that life had been changed - as it has, irrevocably - by these terrorist attacks, which have put London in the front line of the war on terror.
Praise was heaped on the police and emergency services, whose well-rehearsed reaction to the death and damage that unfolded across an arc from chic Marylebone in the west to working-class, Muslim-dominated Moorgate in the east was speedy and efficient.
Tube stations at Edgware Road, Aldgate and Liverpool Street had been sealed off, roads had been closed and nearby buildings evacuated within half an hour of the initial alarms, one police officer said. Yesterday, those stations remained closed, and the area around Russell Square, scene of the bus explosion, was sealed off as a police crime scene.
UNLIKE MADRID, WHERE bombs detonated on early-morning trains claimed the lives of more than 200 people, including children, on March 11th last year, London has so far avoided the cycle of recrimination which led to a change of government and the withdrawal of the small contingent of Spanish troops from Iraq. The Spanish capital came to a standstill, with most shops, restaurants and cafes shuttered as the government declared three days of mourning. Impromptu shrines of flowers and candles were erected around the central railway station and people pinned black ribbons to their chests and flew white flags from their windows.
Days later, after massive anti-terrorism rallies through the city streets, the nation threw out the government of José María Aznar and elected the socialist opposition that had promised to pull out of Iraq, which it did within weeks of winning the poll.
Yesterday, Spain's former foreign minister, Ana Palacio, told BBC radio that her government had made the mistake of not immediately recognising al-Qaeda as the perpetrator, rather than the domestic separatist group, Eta. She urged British authorities to deal swiftly and sternly with the Islamists responsible for the London attacks.
"Everything indicates it is exactly the same pattern. It is Islamist terrorism, which is nothing to do with Muslim communities - but it is Islamist terrorism," she said.
Few commentators believe that what is now being referred to as "London's 9/11" will lead to calls for a change in government policy, whether it be the use of British troops in Iraq alongside the Americans, or the jailing and deporting of suspected terrorists and al-Qaeda sympathisers.
"Opposition to involvement in the Iraq war was more substantial in Spain than in Britain, where it fell at around 50-50, so there is little sign that there will be any demand from the public for change in that regard," said Chris Doyle, director of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding. "Rather, the reaction is likely to be to give the impression that we will not be swayed, at government or public levels, to change. Maybe when we know more about the perpetrators and their history, the view that [prime minister Tony] Blair is partially responsible because of his Iraq policy may take on some traction."
Doyle said that, while foreign military involvement in Iraq and the ongoing post-war occupation was probably a factor behind the bombings, "that doesn't mean that London would never have been hit". He explained that the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington, as well as a series of other attacks dating back more than a decade, pre-dated military action in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The attempt by the London bombers to create an iconic image of one of the world's great cities brought to its knees by blowing the top deck off one of its famous bright-red double-decker buses failed, as London's roads were yesterday once again choked with commuters. Instead, analysts sifting through what little was known of the terror gang responsible for the atrocity concluded that if this was the best that al-Qaeda could do, then Osama bin Laden's shady and loose-knit organisation has perhaps been vastly reduced in scope and capability since September 11th, 2001.
"Al-Qaeda is desperate," said Adel Darwish, an author and commentator on Middle East affairs, who believes that the hallmarks of the attack point unequivocally to adherents of bin Laden. "The signs are there: the attack took place on the seventh of the seventh (seven is an important number in Islam); it coincides with a major event (as the Madrid bombing preceded an important election, this time it is the G8 meeting in Scotland); it was a co-ordinated attack, aimed at so-called 'soft' targets, commuters; the small number of people involved for the maximum impact; and the attempt to make a symbol of the bus and thus attract maximum publicity among a potential support base."
Darwish said, however, that the scale of the attack, with four relatively small bombs, could be a clue that al-Qaeda no longer has the hold over would-be terrorists that it once seemed to have.
"If the organisation really wanted to do something to hurt London, it would blow up the Bank of England," he said.
Far from condemning London's status as a haven for terrorists, Darwish believes that the British government's strategy of allowing known extremists to live freely in the capital and to preach openly their anti-western ideology could be one of the intelligence services' best weapons as they begin their hunt for the bombers.
SOME EUROPEAN AND Middle Eastern governments, France and Egypt among them, have complained that London's policy of tolerance has allowed extremists to use the city as a base for support of al-Qaeda's ideology, earning it the nickname "Londonistan". Requests for the arrest and extradition of some outspoken jihadists suspected of involvement in terrorist atrocities elsewhere have been turned down, with the British government claiming no local laws have been broken.
Security sources have said that by allowing extremists, such as Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad (long linked to bin Laden's International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders) and Abu Hamza al-Masri (who faces extradition to the US to answer terrorism charges), to move and preach freely in London, intelligence services can keep them under closer surveillance, monitoring their movements and learning the identity of their associates.
Some controversial figures, Bakri Muhammad among them, have claimed that the government's policy has provided them with an umbrella of security under which they have been able to exploit Britain's freedoms - of speech, religion, association - as long as they did not dirty the nest.
One terrorism expert, Camille Tawil of the Arabic daily newspaper, Al Hayat, told the New Statesman last year: "The Islamists use Britain as a propaganda base but wouldn't do anything to a country that harbours them and gives them freedom of speech."
Thursday's events appear to have changed the equation. Darwish said that London could have been a "base of last resort" for international terrorists who have already left the country. Or the attacks could have been carried out by "home-grown terrorists," in which case they appear to have escaped the intelligence net.
"My bet is that when the details and gestation of this ghastly plot are laid bare, we will see that at various stages it would have been deterrable or discoverable," said Crispin Black, director of Janusian Security Risk Management and a former government intelligence analyst. "This was certainly the case with 9/11 and also Madrid, where the plotters on a number of occasions excited the suspicion of the authorities, but the leads were tragically not exploited. I doubt that London will be different."
WHILE GOVERNMENT LEADERS, as well as religious and community figures, have been eager to stress that no terrorist attack can infringe on the rights and freedoms Britons take for granted, the reality of daily life is likely to change on many fronts.
The main area, of course, will be security, an area that has caused great concern among Britons who feel that, since 9/11 in the US, their own personal privacy has been eroded in the name of greater national safety.
London is festooned with closed-circuit television cameras that are said to be more numerous in this city than in the rest of Europe put together. As well as this, simple shopping transactions require the divulgence of vast amounts of personal information, and it takes a shop assistant seconds to pull up address and credit details. Now Britons are being warned that they can expect security to be stepped up again to prevent further attacks.
Commuters have already been told that the London Underground will be fitted with electronic body-scanners that will be able to detect whether or not a traveller is strapped with a suicide vest or carrying a bomb in a briefcase or handbag.
Simon Stringer, managing director of a firm that developed the scanners already used on lorries crossing the English Channel, said: "I expect the travelling public will be more prepared to put up with a greater level of surveillance."
He told local media that the London Underground's 270 stations would be fitted with the scanners, which had not been installed before now because of concerns about cost and personal privacy, within 18 months.
The recent push by Blair to introduce a set of anti-terrorist measures, which include preventive detention for suspected foreign nationals, as well as the introduction of identity cards, may be given a fillip by Thursday's atrocity. Until now, such plans have met with stiff opposition from within the Labour party and elsewhere. Detractors have pointed out that identity cards did not help thwart attacks in Spain or the US, where such cards are compulsory.
MUSLIM MEN COULD also be subjected to more intensive intrusion by police conducting random checks, though some observers believe that such targeting, or profiling, has led to the alienation of sections of the British Muslim population.
Massoud Shadjareh heads the Islamic Human Rights Commission, a non- governmental organisation that promotes better relations between Muslim and non-Muslim communities in Britain. After stating that "atrocities are atrocities and we are all victims", he compared the attacks on London's public transport system to the detention of Muslims in Guantanamo Bay and the abuse of prisoners by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
"When we talk about us and them, it should be on this basis," he said. He called for an international effort to deal with the problems that have led to the formation of Islamist extremist organisations. "In Ireland, terrorist elements were isolated, their constituencies were removed, people forgot about them and they became irrelevant. The double standards of western foreign policy - whether it is Israel-Palestine, Rwanda, Bosnia, Afghanistan - is helping to create the constituencies for terrorists, and there is a section of the Muslim community that understands the grievances identified by the extremist elements.
"We have to ensure we create standards around the world that are based on equality and justice, so that we do not feed these constituencies. We need to set up international arenas to do that, not based on race or religion but on internationally accepted standards of justice and equality."
See Eddie Holt, W2