By
Associated Press
LONDON - Raising the specter of a campaign of attacks by opponents of the peace process in Northern Ireland, a powerful bomb blamed by police on IRA dissidents went off early yesterday outside the British Broadcasting Corp.'s television center. One man was hurt.
Britain was on high alert against new attacks following the blast, which Prime Minister Tony Blair denounced as a "cowardly act." He said it would not deter peace efforts in Northern Ireland.
"There are those outside the peace process who are set on trying to turn the clock back to the days before the Good Friday Agreement," Blair said through a spokesman, referring to the province's 1998 peace accord. "We will not allow them to take our focus from working with all parties to move the process on."
No group claimed responsibility for the bombing, but Scotland Yard blamed defectors from the Irish Republican Army, which has observed a cease-fire since 1997. IRA splinter groups that want to keep up the fight to drive British troops out of Northern Ireland have been linked by police to a series of attacks in recent months in London.
"It is quite clear that we are dealing with ruthless terrorists who are quite prepared to use ruthless tactics without any care for the consequences," said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Alan Fry, head of the anti-terrorist branch of the Metropolitan Police. "I fear we will see more attacks in coming days or weeks."
Hours after that warning, the area around busy Victoria Station in the heart of London - crowded with tourists and shoppers - was cordoned off for about 90 minutes after a vehicle deemed suspicious was spotted. The bomb squad moved in and carried out a "controlled explosion," police said, but no explosive device was found.
The BBC blast, which ripped through a quiet neighborhood in west London shortly after midnight and sent an orange fireball into the sky, was preceded by two telephoned warnings that used code words known to police.
Police said the bomb was made of 10 to 20 pounds of high explosive - they did not disclose the type - and planted in a red taxi that was left parked outside the BBC building, facing the wrong way with its lights turned on. The device, controlled by a timer, was detonated as police tried to disable it by remote control.
The taxi was destroyed in the blast, but it was traced to a north London dealer who said he had sold it the day before to a man with a Northern Ireland accent, according to police. Forensic experts spent the day scouring the scene for clues.
The television center's main building was evacuated before the explosion; police said there would almost certainly have been "significant injuries" otherwise. The blast, which could be heard miles away, shattered windows and cracked plaster in nearby buildings, scattering debris over a wide area.
Tom Ryan, who lives in nearby building, said he was woken by a "tremendous bang" that shook the room. "We went outside and there was police everywhere telling us to get back inside," he said.
A London subway system worker was treated at the scene for cuts from flying glass.
The BBC said it handed over tapes from its surveillance cameras in the parking lot to the authorities, but had no other immediate comment, saying the investigation was a police matter. BBC programming was not interrupted.
Tensions in Northern Ireland have been rising in recent months over stalled IRA disarmament and bitter quarrels over police reforms in the province. David Trimble, the Protestant leader of Northern Ireland's struggling power-sharing government, said he believed IRA dissidents wanted to "pull off a spectacular" attack before general elections expected this spring in Britain.
The senior Catholic in the Northern Ireland government, Seamus Mallon, said the bombers were going against the will of the people of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, who overwhelmingly endorsed the Good Friday accord in a referendum.
Fry, the deputy assistant commissioner, said police were looking at the possibility that the attack was staged partly in retaliation for a hard-hitting BBC documentary last year that focused on the Real IRA, an IRA splinter group which carried out a 1998 bombing in the Northern Ireland town of Omagh.
The Omagh blast, which killed 29 people, was the worst terrorist strike in Northern Ireland's history.
The Real IRA was also blamed for a brazen September grenade attack on the London headquarters of Britain's foreign intelligence service MI6. It caused no injuries but did some minor structural damage and embarrassed the spy establishment.
IRA defectors are also believed to be responsible for a series of explosions in England, including a small bomb that exploded on London's Hammersmith Bridge in June and a bomb planted on railway tracks in west London in July.
Yesterday's explosion also took place very near to a west London army base where a 14-year-old boy was seriously injured last month by a flashlight he picked up that had been booby-trapped with high explosives. The boy lost a hand and was left blinded.
