Police seeking London bombers shoot man dead

By Katherine Baldwin

LONDON (Reuters) – Police shot dead a man at a London
underground rail station on Friday and issued photographs of
four men wanted urgently in connection with Thursday’s botched
attempts to bomb the city’s transport network.

They shot the man at Stockwell station in south London,
close to the scene of one of Thursday’s four attempted attacks.

The attempts on three underground trains and a bus
unsettled commuters coming two weeks after bombs ripped through
the city’s transport network, killing over 50 people and
injuring 700.

They also reinforced a sense of unease that after attacks
in New York, Madrid and elsewhere militants linked to al Qaeda
had turned their attention to Britain.

Witnesses spoke of panic as a man of south Asian appearance
wearing a heavy jacket vaulted over barriers at the station as
he was chased, tackled, then shot.

“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. I saw them
kill a man basically. I saw them shoot a man five times,”
witness Mark Whitby told BBC television.

Police said the man was connected to their investigation
but did not say how.

“(He) is still subject to formal identification and it is
not yet clear whether he is one of the four people we are
seeking to identify and whose pictures have been released
today,” they said in a statement.

Sky Television News cited security sources as saying the
man was not a bomber.

Later, police arrested a man near Stockwell station, but
declined to say if he was one of the four.

Another man was arrested at a train station in the city of
Birmingham under anti-terrorism laws but, again, police did not
say if he was suspected of involvement in the London attacks.

Explosives officers were examining two suitcases at the
station, police in Birmingham said.

As in the July 7 attacks, four bombs were taken on to three
trains and a bus, but this time they failed to explode properly
and no one was killed.

President Bush said on Friday the United States and Britain
would not be intimidated by “thugs and assassins.”

He expressed solidarity in the wake of the bombings with
Britain, whose Prime Minister Tony Blair remains his closest
ally in Iraq and Afghanistan.

PHOTOS OF SUSPECTS

Police issued photos of the four suspects from
closed-circuit television cameras and asked for help from the
public in tracing them.

“It is time for the public to do what they are very good
at, which is support investigations,” Andy Hayman, Chief of
Specialist Operations for London police told a news conference.

Commuter Teri Godly said she had stood next to the man shot
dead at Stockwell station before police charged in.

“A tall Asian guy, shaved head, slight beard, with a
rucksack got in front of me. Shortly after that, as I was about
to get onto the train, eight or nine undercover police with
walkie talkies and handguns started screaming at everyone to
‘get out, get out’,” she told Sky News television.

Metropolitan Police chief Ian Blair told a news conference:
“The man was challenged and refused to obey police
instructions.”

Witnesses said there was confusion as shocked passengers
tried to work out what was happening. One man spoke of a
strange smell that seemed to be coming from a smoking bag on
the train.

The Abu Hafs al Masri Brigade, an al Qaeda-linked group
that claimed responsibility for the July 7 bombings, said in a
statement on an Islamist Web site it was behind the attacks.

“Our attack in the heart of the infidel British capital is
nothing but a message to all European governments that we will
not rest until all the infidel troops leave Iraq,” said the
group, whose claims of responsibility for previous attacks in
Europe have been discredited by security experts.

Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, one of Britain’s most outspoken
Islamic clerics, vowed militant Islamists would go on attacking
until the government pulled its troops out of Iraq.

SECURITY ALERTS

As forensics experts studied the trains and bus hit by the
small, near-simultaneous explosions, police were called to a
series of security alerts.

In Harrow Road in west London, armed police searched a
house. A police spokeswoman said no arrests had been made.

Police said they were conducting two other raids.

As the manhunt intensified, commuters eyed one another
nervously on buses and underground trains.

“You can see passengers are more nervous as they get on the
bus, they glance at people with bags and I am always looking at
peoples’ bags,” said bus driver Danny Prescott.

A union official warned that hundreds of underground train
drivers might refuse to work if there were more attacks.

In New York, commuters faced random searches of backpacks
and packages as police stepped up checks.

British police have more clues from Thursday’s attacks,
including the unexploded bombs, witness reports and CCTV
footage, than they had after the July 7 bombs.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Gray, Mark Trevelyan, Yara
Bayoumy, Sumeet Desai, Katie Allen, Kate Holton, Mike Peacock,
Jeremy Lovell, Matthew Jones, Fiona Shaikh)