London Gets Lucky

The man vaulted the ticket barrier and ran onto the platform at the Stockwell underground station, pursued by up to 20 police officers who had ordered him to stop. Wearing a heavy coat — odd, on a hot summer day — the man stumbled onto a waiting Northern Line train and was tackled. As he sprawled on the floor, one of the officers — following previously secret "shoot to kill" guidelines covering possible suicide bombers — unloaded five bullets into his head. Was the dead man one of the four conspirators who had tried to bomb London the day before? He was not. He was a Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, who had lived in London for three years and who, the police admitted in an apology, had no connection to the terror plots. And so an edgy city got edgier; the terrorists who have targeted London have achieved that much, at least.

The British capital is now the uneasy center of a modern war. It is one that pits young men, keen to attempt mass murder, using surprise high technology and the camouflage of ordinariness, against a giant, imperfect machinery of surveillance and force bent on catching them. A quartet of bombers deployed themselves throughout London's public transport system last Thursday, in an attack chillingly similar to the one two weeks before that killed 56 people. On both occasions there were four bombers carrying backpacks, three on Underground trains and one on a bus. As on July 7, the three would-be tube bombers triggered their blasts almost simultaneously. "Clearly the intention must have been to kill," said Ian Blair, chief of London's police. His force had been worried that there might be another cell primed to follow up the July 7 blasts. This time, thankfully, the bombs fizzled. Detonators exploded, but not the main charge — possibly because the bombs were built from the same batch of home-brewed chemical known as TATP that is thought to have been used on July 7. TATP degrades quickly. By Saturday two men were under arrest for terror offenses, both from the Stockwell area of south London. One had been led away with a woman and child from an apartment in a housing project. Neighbors said the family was from Ethiopia and was Muslim. Police would not say whether the arrested men were bomb suspects.

London was lucky. Outwardly, the city responded to the attempted bombings with the same determination to get on with life as it had shown two weeks before. Yet the depressing prospect of a perpetual threat — and the need for perpetual vigilance — could not be avoided. There were some small causes for relief in the differences between last week's attacks and those on July 7. The bus bomber alighted 25 minutes before his charge detonated, so he was not seeking suicide. At least one of the backpacks was smaller than those used on July 7. The fizzled detonations prompted some experts to argue that the second group was more amateurish, or had been prevented from getting vital components. But the police themselves do not seem to think that the second set of bombs were the work of unrelated copycats. "The two incidents do have similarities," said police special operations chief Andy Hayman, implying that London was now under siege by radical jihadists.

That is bound to have an impact on British habits and laws. A nation that has long prided itself on the fact that most of its policemen go about unarmed is uneasy about seeing flak jackets and machine guns on its streets. Indeed, pictures of plain-clothes marksmen cradling enormous automatic weapons outside Stockwell station were redolent more of Baghdad or Kabul than south London. Already, the British government is preparing legislation that will grant much wider powers to the authorities, enabling them — it is hoped — both to crack down on those who aid and abet terrorists and roll up networks of would-be murderers. Yet for all the action on the streets and in the bureaucracy, the second wave of attacks — and the fact that the bombers had not been caught up in the dragnet that was cast after July 7 — proved how much there was still to do.