Police in London have carried out a controlled explosion on a suspect device at Victoria Station. This security alert follows an overnight bomb attack outside the London headquarters of the BBC. No one was seriously injured in the BBC explosion, which happened as a police bomb squad was attempting to deal with the device. Scotland Yard has linked the attack to the Real IRA, which carried out three high profile attacks in London last year. Politicians, North and South, have condemned the bomb attack.
The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Brian Cowen, said that it was the mindless act of people who have rejected all attempts to bring peace to these islands. A highly explosive device was planted in a taxi parked near the studios at Wood Lane in Shepherd's Bush. The bomb went off as attempts were made to carry out a controlled explosion. A London Underground worker was hit near the eye by flying glass but his injuries are described as minor.
Windows at the BBC building were blown out and the studios were evacuated of hundreds of staff, which resulted in disruption to programmes. Two telephone calls using a coded message had been received to warn of the bomb attack.
The car bomb attack could be linked to the Panorama report into the Omagh bombing, a terrorism expert suggested today. Professor Paul Wilkinson, from St Andrew's University, said that the attack was almost certainly the work of the dissident Irish Republican group, the Real IRA, and that it could have been sparked off by the BBC investigation. “There could be many reasons for the bombing, but I think this very courageous documentary would have angered the dissidents,” he said.
The Panorama programme entitled Who Bombed Omagh? was screened in October last year and named individuals who had been questioned by police over the bombing. The Omagh atrocity, carried out by the Real IRA, killed 29 people when a car bomb exploded in Omagh town centre on a Saturday afternoon in August 1998. Professor Wilkinson, director of St Andrew's Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, added that the theory was one of a number of possible reasons for the incident.
