London - The red double-decker bus blown up in last week's bomb attacks in London is the one piece of the puzzle that doesn't quite fit, say some terrorism experts, who think the bomber might have detonated the explosives accidentally.
The bus explosion in Tavistock Square occurred nearly an hour after three Underground trains were blown up within a minute of one another.
News reports quoted an eyewitness as saying he saw an agitated man rummaging through his bag on board the doomed No 30 bus just before it exploded, killing 13 people.
Those two factors have fuelled speculation about whether the bombers' plans might have gone awry.
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| 'This bombing is curious in that it doesn't seem to fit the pattern' |
"This bombing is curious in that it doesn't seem to fit the pattern," said Alex Standish, editor of Jane's Intelligence Digest.
"It was later than all the others. This would have appeared to be primarily an attack on the Underground system. "It just doesn't fit."
Standish said he thought the bus bomber might have meant to target a fourth subway train but had either panicked or been unable to board because his co-conspirators were too far ahead of him and had already shut down the system by the time he was ready.
He might have been among those herded out of or turned away from King's Cross station - close to the site of the deadliest of the Tube bombs - and boarded the doomed No 30 bus there, Standish said.
The bus blew up at 9.47am on Thursday in the Bloomsbury neighbourhood, only a few minutes' drive from the station.
Standish said someone intending to destroy a double-decker bus would be likely to position a bomb on the bottom deck to inflict maximum damage, rather than the top deck, where police say the bomb was placed.
Media reports quoted the witness who got off the bus just before it exploded - Richard Jones, 61, of Berkshire, west of London - as saying he saw a man in his 20s fiddling anxiously with something in his bag.
"Everybody is standing face-to-face and this guy kept dipping into this bag," Jones told the BBC.
Police have refused to comment on the theories about the bus explosion.
"Probably one of the lines of inquiry will be to look at why it was in a different location, different transport mode and at a different time," said Deputy Chief Constable Andy Trotter of the British Transport Police. Some, though, think attacking one of London's iconic double-decker buses might have been exactly what the bombers intended.
While video footage from the Underground bombs was slow to emerge, chilling photographs of the mangled bus with its roof blown off were on the front page of nearly every British newspaper.
That visibility - and the heightened sense of fear and confusion created by targeting more than one form of transportation - might have been just what the attackers had in mind, said Magnus Ranstorp, of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews University in Scotland.
"It maximised the psychological impact," he said.
- This article was originally published on page 3 of Cape Times on July 13, 2005
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