Today.Az » Politics » London was attacked by terrorists today
07 July 2005 [19:23] - Today.Az
Near 9:00 am there was a series of bomb attacks in the Subway and in the city buses. 30 dead and near 200 injured.
There was five blast in London subway and one in the city bus. Initially news agences reported about 2 killed and 90 injured, but then this numbers increased up to 30 killed and 300 injured, 150 from their injured seriously.
The "BlackBritain" brung a chronology of the events:
At 8.49am, the first bomb went off at Old Street and Liverpool Street stations in the east of the city and at the heart of London's commercial district.
- At 9.17am there was a blast on a train at Edgware Road towards the west of the capital. 3 trains were involved in the incident, claiming the lives of 5 commuters.
- This was followed by another device detonating at 9.40am on a tube train between King's Cross and Leicester Square, right in the centre of London. Emergency services say 21 people died in that explosion.
- The final confirmed explosion at 9.47am was on the top deck, at the back of double-decker bus. The number 30 bus route, which runs through north London, stopping at Hackney, Dalston and Islington and terminates at the West End's Marble Arch.
The Metropolitan police has said they received no warning prior to the attack and no group has claimed responsibility for the fatal blasts.
An Islamist website has posted a statement - purportedly from al-Qaeda - claiming it was behind the attacks.
First time the authorities of London try to explain the causes of tragedy with the damage of power system, but later this version was denied. The Met Police chief has said it was probably a 'major terrorist attack' on the tube network which is used by up to 3 million people every day. Scotland Yard's Commissioner has advised members of the public not to travel into London.
The Britain prime-minister Tony Blair, who participated in summit G8 in Scotland, haved to left it. Blair in behalf of other participants of summit makes special treatment, where expressed the condemning of terrorists:
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in his statement:
"It's reasonably clear there have been a series of terrorist attacks in London. There are, obviously, casualties, both people that have died and people seriously injured. And our thoughts and prayers, of course, are with the victims and their families.
It's my intention to leave the G-8 within the next couple of hours and go down to London and get a report face to face with the police and the emergency services and the ministers that have been dealing with this, and then to return later this evening.
It is the will of all the leaders at the G-8, however, that the meeting should continue in my absence, that we should continue to discuss the issues that we were going to discuss and reach the conclusions which we were going to reach.
Each of the countries around that table has some experience of the effects of terrorism. And all the leaders, as they will indicate a little bit later, share our complete resolution to defeat this terrorism.
It's particularly barbaric that this has happened on a day when people are meeting to try to help the problems of poverty in Africa and the long-term problems of climate change in the environment.
Just as it is reasonably clear that this is a terrorist attack, or a series of terrorist attacks, it's also reasonably clear that it is designed and aimed to coincide with the opening of the G-8.
There will be time to talk later about this.
It's important, however, that those engaged in terrorism realize that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world.
Whatever they do, it is our determination that they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear in this country and in other civilized nations throughout the world."
The accident in the UK capital evoked the turmoil in the financial markets.
As MarketWatch wrote, the Amex Securities Broker/Dealer Index ($XBD: news, chart, profile) fell 1%, the Philadelphia Bank Sector Index ($BKX: news, chart, profile) fell 0.9% and the S&P Insurance Index (IUX: news, chart, profile) fell 1.1%.
Virtually all the stocks in the three indexes fell.
Among other individual stocks, Mercantile Bank Corp shares fell 19 cents to $44.81 after rising initially on better than expected earnings.
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