July 24, 2005
Connections
British authorities are now saying that the attempted bombings in London on July 21st may be directly related to the bombings on July 7th.
A flier in a backpack found with undetonated explosives on a London bus was for a whitewater rafting center at Bala, North Wales, where two of the July 7 bombers had been photographed just weeks before the attack, a police official said.
The explosive used in both attacks was TATP, which has a shelf life of only a few days. After that, it has deteriorated enough that it will no longer detonate. If the TATP used in the attacks was from the same batch, the failure of the second attack is exactly what we would expect to see. Couple the above evidence with the numerous obvious similarities in the attack pattern between the two, and it starts looking like these were in fact related attacks, contrary to what I thought on Thursday.
The two attacks in London (or the two parts of one multi-phase attack) and the attack in Egypt seem to point to a still functioning Al Qaeda leadership:
The officials and analysts also said the recent attacks indicate that the nerve center of the original al Qaeda network remains alive and well, despite the fact that many leaders have been killed or captured since the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings in the United States. Bin Laden may be in hiding, the officials and analysts said, and much is still unknown about the network. But they added that his organization remains fully capable of orchestrating attacks worldwide by recruiting local groups to do its bidding."What the London and Sharm el-Sheikh attacks may have in common are the people giving directions: This is what needs to be done, and this is how you do it," said Magnus Ranstorp, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Prince Turki al Faisal, the former director of foreign intelligence for Saudi Arabia who was named this past week as the kingdom's new ambassador to the United States, said in an interview, "All of these groups maintain a link of sort with bin Laden, either through Internet Web sites, or through messengers, or by going to the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan and maybe not necessarily meeting with bin Laden himself, but with his people.
Perhaps we should try twisting Musharraf's arms a little harder on finding Bin Laden.
Posted by ben at July 24, 2005 12:48 PM