Explosion heard in London

[MikeH]

Exactly you can't check every person on the street at all times, and restricting what people can carry is unreasonable.

We still need to maintain our freedoms.

[child of Thor]

Patroling sniffer dog teams wouldn't affect our freedom too much. Anyway i think the freedom issue is one the PM is very aware of - ID cards will have more support now, so this act of terror will inevitably lead to us having less freedoms. I'd rather have a spot check on my bag than my bio-metric details on a government database as a means to foil a terrorist anyday.

[Thorgal]

Somebody said here that once the terract has occured everything has finished. I hope so, however... I dont want to be a killjoy but a thing nobody has mentioned yet is that at this moment the terrorist cell is at 100% and active. If police cant stop them they surely will try ti act again in the next days in London.

[child of Thor]

Yes, exactly why we shouldn't relax our gaurd - we need to increase our vigulance just in case. Ask about that bag no-one is holding(stuff i do anyway), be alert. sucks but we have to deal with it now.
Still if they had any sense the guys that did this evil thing will be long gone, i hope so anyway - dont need anymore of this s**t for the time being

[Ninot]

I know its not the best news source (by far)

but CNN was talking about the "miracle" of 2 dead on the bus this morning. Either they're too lazy to try and get an update on that and want to leave it there, or that really is the total.

I find that hard to believe tho.

but they also reported that they haven't been able to get very far into King's Crossing yet, because the wreckage is so bad that's its keeping them out of where the real damage to human life must be. So the casualty number can still climb quite a bit.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

I remember traveling the UK and was stuck by the small things that spoke to their IMO far superior security measures vs. the US.

Simple things like having no trash cans on the train platforms were explained to me a reasoned response to previous IRA trash can bombings.

And yet despite all this...

[LDiCesare]

I wonder whether the London tube has teh same feature as the French RER: It's impossible to put bags under the seats. Before the explosion in Paris way back you could put a bag under the seat, which was actually practical, but you no longer can. That makes spotting abandonned luggage easier.

[lightblue]

Just heard on the radio that more then 2 people have died on the bus. Couldn't hear if it was 13 or 30, and bbc hasn't got anything yet on their site.

[MikeH]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
I wonder whether the London tube has teh same feature as the French RER: It's impossible to put bags under the seats. Before the explosion in Paris way back you could put a bag under the seat, which was actually practical, but you no longer can. That makes spotting abandonned luggage easier.

Yep. No underseat storage or luggage rails above the seats.

[child of Thor]

for sure when you see the pictures of what was left of it........had to be more 2. Or as people were saying a miracle.

[Panda]

Well today was new:

Saw two people on my team who hadn't made it into work yesterday. One,who travels in from East London, says she'd made it as far as the Angel before managing to get through to us on the phone to be told to turn around again. She says that returning on the bus a police officer boarded the bus and asked that everybody turn out their belongings into their laps so that he could check for suspicious packages. The other says that this morning his tube journey was delayed because at every stop they were boarded by police with sniffer dogs who checked the entire length of the train before letting the train go on.

Mind you, the piccadilly line is completely shut down so it isn't like they have to have a team at every single LU station.

[Ninot]

Originally posted by Panda
Well today was new:

Saw two people on my team who hadn't made it into work yesterday. One,who travels in from East London, says she'd made it as far as the Angel before managing to get through to us on the phone to be told to turn around again. She says that returning on the bus a police officer boarded the bus and asked that everybody turn out their belongings into their laps so that he could check for suspicious packages. The other says that this morning his tube journey was delayed because at every stop they were boarded by police with sniffer dogs who checked the entire length of the train before letting the train go on.

Mind you, the piccadilly line is completely shut down so it isn't like they have to have a team at every single LU station.

That seems like a delayed reaction to me (i cant think of a better thing to call it).

The attacks where yesterday. Terrorists dont exactly have a record of attacking the same thing 2 days in a row, and I highly doubt this kind of vigilence is gonna last.

[FrustratedPoet]

Confirmed number of dead on the bus is at 13 now.

49 people confirmed dead in total so far. It'll definitely go over 50, but we're told that it won't go as high as 100.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Dissident
what's it like to have your city terror bombed?

Dare I say one gets used to it- London experienced decades of I.R.A. & I.N.L.A. bombing campaigns- we've seen embassies occupied, policewomen shot from inside embassies, railway stations bombed, army barracks bombed,- but guess what ?


Life goes on, more or less as normal.

I've lived in Coventry and worked in a mediaeval almshouse that is situated a stone's throw from where an I.R.A. terrorist blew himself up in the 1970s.

I studied in Manchester, where when I was living there the Libyans attempted to assassinate a dissident with a bomb and the Ba'ath secret service killed an Iraqi dissident.

You defeat terror by recognising that they win when you alter your life to suit their tactics.

As a great man said, and Aaron Neville sang, all we have to fear is fear itself.

" So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. "

Franklin Delano Roosevelt



This morning I happily used London's transport system to get from where I live (walking past the Islamic Centre at the end of my street) to where my friend lives in Stoke Newington- an area full of Kurdish and Turkish shops and supermarkets.

Passed a splendid Turco-Persian style mosque and managed not to get attacked by any deranged Islamists.


And tomorrow I will go out to Queen's Market and buy my vegetables and tamarind paste and just carry on as normal.

[Thorgal]

I read somewhere that IF they act again in next days (maybe they blew themselve up yesterday) it is highly unlikely that the targets will be tube and buses again, too difficult. Maybe some easy targets like train rails in open field (like they tried in Madrid some days after Atocha) or something like that.