London shivers after fear fortnight

London police chief Ian Blair told reporters: ‘‘We know that we’ve had four explosions or attempts at explosions.’’ He said it was clear the devices had been intended to kill, but some appeared not to have gone off properly and only one person had been reported injured.

The explosions took place at the Warren Street tube station in the north, the Oval in the south, Shepherd’s Bush in the west. A fourth bomb went off on the upper deck of a bus on Hackney Road in the east.

There were clear parallels to the 7/7 attacks: the plan was to strike at the heart of London on the opening day of the long awaited Ashes series. Amidst the rare event of an Australian batting collapse came the news of the closure of London. Two weeks ago, when the attacks took place, Londoners were still celebrating their Olympic nomination victory over arch-rival Paris.

This time the terrorists targeted the Victoria and Northern line that remained unaffected in the earlier attacks. This again seemed a well thought out plan, a statement that despite extreme caution the terror network could hit whenever and wherever.

At the Oval, a man was seen running from the train as soon as it pulled in. ‘‘There was a big bang,’’ recalled a witness named Andrea.

‘‘It sounded as if a balloon had popped but it was a lot louder, and then we all moved to one end of the carriage. They opened the door so we could move into the next carriage and there was a guy standing in the carriage.

We pulled into Oval and we all got off. The guy just ran and started running up the escalator. Everyone was screaming: stop him.’’

The bomb on the Victoria line train was more like a firecracker. Said Sofiane Mohellebi: ‘‘When the train was in the tunnel, it was agonising, there was no way to get to the next carriage. Some people left behind their shoes and bags of shopping. Some people said don’t panic. In my mind, I thought why not panic?’’

On Hackney Road in east London, a bomb went off on bus number 26. It was not crowded, there were hardly 15 people in it. ‘‘There was an explosion on the bus. The driver stopped the bus and got out to look. On the back seat of the bus, a backpack was found,’’ said Guy Stock.

Emergency services were quick to move. All four stations were evacuated quickly and calmly. 200 meter exclusions zones were enforced around the incident sites. Ambulances and medical services were put on standby.

Police sources said they were hunting several fugitives, according to BBC television.

‘‘There is a resonance here,’’ police chief Ian Blair said. ‘‘Whether or not this is… carried out by the same group of people… it’s going to take a little longer before we can qualify that.’’

The attacks have forced the Prime Minister to defend himself against accusations that Britain’s participation in the US invasion of Iraq had made it a target for Islamic militants.

A poll published this week indicated that two-thirds of Britons think the July 7 bombings were linked to Iraq.

Blair denied he had put London at risk, saying: ‘‘The people who are responsible for terrorist attacks are the terrorists.’’

British shares and the pound fell on Thursday, but recovered once it emerged the attacks were not on the scale of the earlier ones.

Navin Reddy, a risk analyst at Merchant International Group in London, said the attacks were ‘‘most probably the work of a copycat group of young, disaffected Muslims who were inspired by the events of July 7 to carry out an operation of their own’’. — (With Reuters)