Failed Times Square Terror Bombing Mirrors the Al Qaeda Attempt In London 3 Years Ago

With the shockwaves hitting all of America this morning of just how close New York City came to having a huge terror attack kill many, many people on the streets near Times Square, I ran across this article at The Telegraph that paints a very eerie picture of how this failed attack in New York City mirrors the failed al Qaeda attack in central London three years ago.

I have never seen such intricate details of that attempted terror attack in London as described in the article but it will be interesting to see just how closely those tactics end up compared to the attempt in NYC - and will there be found a link to al Qaeda in the Times Square plot.

Times Square bombing attempt recalls al Qaeda attacks on London


The Times Square car bomb in New York bears all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda attack on central London three years ago.


Intelligence agencies believe that Bilal Abdulla, one of the men behind the British attack, had met senior leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

He wrote a dedication, later found on his laptop, to two of the leaders of the organisation - Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Masri - who were killed by US forces in Tikrit 12 days ago.

The two bombers- Abdulla, a junior doctor from Iraq, and Kafeel Ahmed, an engineering student from India – teamed up after they met while studying in Cambridge.

The men left cars packed with gas canisters and petrol outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub on the Haymarket, between Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square, in London’s busy West End.

The first car, a green Mercedes, was parked with the headlights on in a bus lane outside the front entrance to the nightclub.

The device failed to fully ignite, and the fume-filled vehicle was spotted by a doorman at the nightclub.

A second car bomb, in a blue Mercedes, had been parked at the back entrance to the club but was towed away by parking wardens and found several hours later at a car pound in Hyde Park.

The bombs were to be set off using mobile phone detonators, rather than the timers in New York, but they failed to ignite because there was not enough air inside the car.

Rather than using fireworks, as in New York, the men had filled syringes with the chlorate material from match heads as improvised detonators.

After the attack failed, the pair escape from the scene by rickshaw, then returned by coach to Glasgow where they attempted to launch a suicide operation by driving a Jeep filled with petrol and gas canisters into the airport terminal.

Police were only an hour behind them after using their mobile phones to track them to the shores of Loch Lomond.

Investigators also used the Automated Number Plate Recognition system which helped them identify the second vehicle.

Later checks revealed the men had bought a series of second hand cars using false names from private sellers across the North of England.

Despite Abdulla’s connections with al-Qaeda, the devices were fairly amateurish, using elements easily available to the men, who had conducted at least some of their research on the internet.

Each car had two improvised detonators, designed to ignite a mixture of air, propane and petrol.

The boot of the green Mercedes was packed with 86 litres of petrol in four plastic containers.

Behind the front seats of the car, in the rear footwells, were two patio propane gas cylinders, one of which had been turned on, and a small butane camping gas cylinder.

In each car two “hot wire igniters” were made from syringes which had been filled with chlorate from match heads and the lightbulb from a car headlamp.

The lightbulb was attached to a “trigger circuit” which used a Nokia 3310 mobile phone as a remote detonator, although they had also considered using a Casio digital watch as a timer.

The aim was apparently to create a “boiling liquid, expanding vapour” explosion in which the propane first boiled in the canisters and then exploded.

But the point at which the air and propane mix would ignite was relatively short as the car filled with gas and while the detonator ignited in the second car, the bomb did not explode.

Ahmed died in hospital from burns he sustained in the Glasgow attack and Abdulla was jailed for life.