Credit: UK Times Online/ABC News

I missed this on ABC News last night, but The UK Times online followed up and Andrew Stuttaford at The Corner linked:

Shocking new images have emerged of unexploded bombs, some packed around with nails, which were found in a car left behind by the July 7 London bombers.

In total, 16 bombs were found in the red Nissan car parked at Luton railway station. It is is believed the car was rented in Leeds by Shehzad Tanweer, one of the four bombers who killed themselves and 52 others in a co-ordinated attack on three London Underground trains and a bus earlier this month.

The sheer number of devices has raised fears that the scale of the July 7 bomb plot was much larger than originally imagined.

The presence of nailbombs graphically illustrates that the bombing cell wanted to inflict the maximum possible pain, injury and risk of death on innocent London commuters, security analysts say.

“You see what is bulging on the sides of the bottle are nails. Many, many nails,” said Robert Ayers, a security expert who was shown the pictures by the American ABC News channel last night.

“And the nails are put there so that when the bomb goes off, the nails will tear tissue and kill people in the area. Bombs don’t kill by concussion. Small bombs, they kill by the blast effects of fragments of glass or metal, and this is designed to kill people.”

Here’s the ABC News transcript of the interview between ABC presenters Elizabeth Vargas and Pierre Thomas, and Robert Ayers, a security analyst who was shown the nailbomb pictures. It ends:

THOMAS: So now, Elizabeth, you understand why police here in London are so deeply concerned. They are in a race against time, against people who want to kill.

Memo to the White House: This is a war. Not a “struggle.”

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Related:

Latest news on the arrests of bombing suspect Yasin Hassan Omar and others here.
Another suspect is Muktar Said Ibrahim. Here’s what one of his London neighbors told the Belfast Telegraph:

A neighbour of Ibrahim, Sarah Scott, age 23, who lives two doors down from the Stanmore home Ibrahim used to live with his parents, described a conversation they had last November. “We were standing outside our houses chatting. He asked me if I was religious and I said I did not believe in anything. He said I should. He told me he was going to get 80 virgins when he got to heaven if he praised Allah.

“He smiled and laughed as he said it, then he gave me this book about Islam and told me to read it.

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