London bombs suggest local but well-equipped cell

LONDON - Suspected al Qaeda militants behind the London bombings may well have come from a previously unknown local cell and yet had access to military explosives, European security officials familiar with the probe said.

"The explosives appear to be of military origin, which is very worrying," said Christophe Chaboud, head of the French Anti-Terrorism Coordination Unit and one of five top officials sent by Paris to London immediately after Thursday's attacks.

"We're more used to cells making home-made explosives with chemicals. How did they get them?" he said in an interview with Le Monde newspaper.

"Either by trafficking, for example, in the Balkans, or they had someone on the inside who enabled them to get them out of a military establishment."

Chaboud's comments went further than London police, who have only said so far that the bombs contained less than 10 lb (4.5 kg) each of "high explosives" and were small enough to be carried in rucksacks.

By comparison, the 10 bombs that blew apart four commuter trains in Madrid last year weighed about 22 lb (10 kg) each. The explosive, known as Goma 2 Eco and used in quarrying, had been stolen from a mine in northern Spain.

Asked about the French comments, a senior London police spokesman said the explosives were still being examined and there was no confirmation that they were military in origin.

"We are waiting for the forensic tests," he said.

Intelligence briefing

London police summoned investigators and intelligence officials from about 30 countries to a meeting at Scotland Yard on Saturday to brief them on last Thursday's bombings which killed at least 49 people.

A source at a European intelligence agency represented at the meeting said the attacks were most likely carried out by a local cell of Islamist militants with no previous track record.

"We think the known Islamists who live in Britain are under such close observation that they're limited in their capacity for action. Against that background, the suspicion is that it's a local group," the source said.

"At the moment there's no proof, but the thinking is that Islamists who have been known since Afghanistan or through other attacks could not have been involved in detail ... That is less suggestive of a big central network."

Even before the bombings, officials had expressed increasing concern about a "homegrown" militant threat, and suspects held in several foiled plots have been British citizens.

The United States has sent FBI forensic specialists to help investigators analyse the bomb sites -- a vast challenge because three of the attacks were on underground trains. The other, on a bus, spread debris over a wide area.

Spanish investigators are also assisting, because of the similarity between the mode of the attacks and those on Madrid 16 months ago.

Back then, Spanish police obtained an almost immediate breakthrough by analysing a bomb which had failed to go off and tracing the origin of a cellphone whose alarm had been meant to trigger it. This led to early arrests.

London investigators have had no such breaks, but an anti-terrorist spokeswoman said the scarcity of updates about the investigation did not mean there was no progress.

"We wouldn't want that to come across at all. We are not in a position to go public with it," she said.