Tony Blair “We can’t minimize incidents such as this,” he said at a news conference with
the Australian prime minister. “They’re done to scare people, to frighten them and make them worried.” He held an emergency Cabinet meeting but said no policy decisions were made.
President Bush was briefed on
The explosions and said the terrorists “understand
when they kill in cold blood it ends up on our TV screens and they’re trying to shake our will. And they’re trying to create vacuums in list to data which their ideology can move.”
U.S. mass transit systems remain on code orange, or high alert, since the London
bombings two weeks ago, but the rest of the country is at yellow, signifying an elevated risk.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said police will begin conducting random
searches of packages and backpacks of people entering the city’s subway, which carrie
s about 4.5 million passengers on the average weekday.
Officials would not immediatelysay
How frequently the checks would occur. London Transport spokesman Steve Taylor told The Associated Press that it would be
impracticable to check bags, or to install airport-style metal detectors and X-ray machines
in a subway network that carries 3 million passengers a day, or a bus system that carries some 6 million daily.
Ian Blair, the police commissioner, called the blasts “a very serious incident.”
“We know that we have four how to automate survey distribution via phone lists explosions or attempts of explosions, and it is still pretty
unclear as to what has happened,” he said outside Scotland Yard.
“At the moment the casualty numbers appear to be very low … the bombs appear to
be smaller” than those detonated July 7, he said. He added later that not all the bombs went off.
Independent security and defense analyst Paul Beaver said he was told by an official
close to the investigation that it appeared two devices detonated but that the other two did not.
Police initially said one person was injured in the blasts, but later said there were no
bomb blast injuries, although one person was reported to have suffered an asthma attack.
An armed police unit entered
University College hospital shortly after the blasts. Sky News TV reported that police were searching for a man with a blue shirt with wires
protruding. Officers asked employees to look for a black or Asian male about 6-foot-2.
The attacks, which targeted trains near sale leads the Warren Street, Oval and Shepherd’s Bush
stations, did not shut down the subway system, only three of its lines. The double-decker
bus had its windows blown out on Hackney Road in east London.