“The era of the car bomb”?
The Independent talks about the UK and the West entering “the era of the car bomb”:
A blue 280E model Mercedes was illegally parked in Cockspur Street, near Trafalgar Square, but was towed to a Park Lane car pound at 3.30am on Friday. The explosive device inside did not go off. If successful, the trap would have resembled the attack on backpackers in a Bali nightclub in 2002, when a suicide bomb led those escaping straight into the path of a van packed with explosives.
“The danger here is that we are entering the era of the car bomb,” said an intelligence source. “In the past, al-Qa’ida-style terrorists have used high-explosive bombs aimed at symbolic, high-profile targets,” he said, but that might have changed out of necessity. “It’s easy to make a gas and nail car bomb without raising suspicion.”
The plot has striking similarities with one that resulted in Dhiren Barot being jailed for life last November, for conspiring to park limousines packed with gas canisters underneath high-profile buildings, with the intention of later detonating them. Another member of the gang jailed in connection with that plot had a brother called Lamine Adam who allegedly spoke of attacking clubs. Adam was put under a control order with his younger brother Ibrahim, 20, and their friend Cerie Bullivant, 24. But all three disappeared.
It is now known that the bomb outside Tiger Tiger would have been set off by a call to a mobile phone in the car triggering a home-made incendiary detonator. This would have set light to petrol vapour, instantly exploding petrol cans in the car and the fuel tank. As the car burned very quickly the heat would have detonated gas cylinders containing compressed gas, causing a large explosion and scattering the nails…
MI5 said last year it believed Islamist radicals were plotting at least 30 major terrorist attacks in Britain and it was tracking some 1,600 suspects.
“The danger here is that we are entering the era of the car bomb.” Danger, but not just danger. One result of this escalation by the enemy in his religious war may be that it hastens the time when the West begins to see this affair as a war rather than a law enforcement matter. Perhaps also it may hasten the time when the MSM stop their tiresome reporting of Islamic terrorism as an “amateurish” minor irritant of little consequence to the sophisticated professionals of the West.
Whether it was Leon Trotsky or Alan Furst, it continues to be true, and perhaps the elites of the West will soon be forced to acknowledge it: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”