[continued from previous message] 
  
 back several people had run over to try and stop the men, who were 
 Asian. I could see that one of the men was on fire, she said. 
  
 In London, no one took responsibility publicly for the foiled attack on 
 Friday, which was thwarted almost by accident when an ambulance crew 
 and traffic wardens on Friday separately discovered the sedans packed 
 with gasoline, gas canisters and nails. 
  
 But an online forum monitored by the SITE Institute, which tracks 
 jihadist Web sites, asked whether London had been craving explosions 
 from Al Qaeda after authorities in June bestowed a knighthood on the 
 author Salman Rushdie, reviled by some radical Muslims for his book 
 The Satanic Verses. 
  
 No established link exists between the knighthood and the foiled 
 bombings, a British security official said, speaking in return for 
 anonymity, but the posting on the jihadist site was likely to be 
 closely scrutinized by investigators. 
  
 The British news media have asserted that if the bombs had gone off 
 they would likely have caused havoc and huge loss of life, but some 
 experts have questioned the level of sophistication involved in the 
 devices, which officials call vehicle-borne improvised explosive 
 devices. 
  
 The Times of London reported Saturday that the police had warned 
 nightclub operators a few days ago of the threat of such attacks. 
  
 The two cars were parked around a corner from each other. The first to 
 be discovered and disarmed was found outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub 
 on the Haymarket near Piccadilly Circus. The second was towed away for 
 a parking infraction about 90 minutes later from nearby Cockspur Street 
 leading to Trafalgar Square, the police said. 
  
 In the United States, Strategic Forecasting, a private research group, 
 said the amateur construction of the explosive device and the way it 
 was placed suggest the plotter or plotters have no connection to a 
 major militant organization. 
  
 Sajjan M. Gohel, a security expert, said the police were pursuing a 
 theory that the two bombs had been designed to explode one after the 
 other " the first to bring people into the street and the second to 
 cause great loss of life. The fact that Thursday night at Tiger Tiger 
 was ladies night, he said, recalled a conspiracy in 2004 in which 
 British-born bombers said they wanted to attack women at a nightclub, 
 whom they viewed as promiscuous, in conversations monitored by British 
 intelligence. 
  
 In their hunt for the would-be bombers, the British police say they are 
 poring over thousands of images from the closed-circuit television 
 cameras that film the streets of central London. 
  
 [Reporting was contributed by Dexter Filkins from Cambridge, Mass., 
 William K. Rashbaum from New York and Scott Shane from Washington.] 
  
 Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 
  
                                 * 
 ================================================================ 
  NY Transfer News Collective    *    A Service of Blythe Systems 
            Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 
  Search Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/htdig/search.html 
  List Archives:   http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ 
  Subscribe: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr 
 ================================================================ 
  
 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- 
 Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (FreeBSD) 
  
 iD8DBQFGhzGIiz2i76ou9wQRAvueAJ4z5XoFKeYQrkK7twiwATOvuLtaIQCfZG9F 
 zCJmEhbEkJrKf6syAPvnJ3U= 
 =oAor 
 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)