Video Shows U.K. Bomb Suspects Mid-Attack

Prosecutors laying out their case against six men accused of attempting suicide attacks on London's transit system presented video images on Tuesday apparently showing a bomb misfiring in a crowded Underground train, and of one suspect scrambling away from a train after another device failed to explode.

The CCTV footage shows a puff of flour — allegedly a bomb component — blowing out of a suspect's backpack in the alleged attack on July 21, 2005, two weeks after an attack in which four suicide bombers killed 52 transport passengers in the city.

The images were shown to jurors on the second day of the prosecution's opening arguments against the six, who are accused of conspiring to kill bus and subway passengers with bombs made of hydrogen peroxide and chapati flour.

The video sequence followed a man identified as defendant Ramzi Mohamed as he entered a subway station, boarded a crowded train carriage, allegedly attempted to detonate an explosive device and then sprinted away at the next station, with passengers and bystanders in pursuit.

The suspect is seen standing in the carriage, facing a mother with a small child; he held on to a rail with his right hand and had his left hand in his pocket, and his bag is on the floor.

"Whilst the train was in the tunnel between the stations, Mohamed turned so that his rucksack was facing the mother and child by him, and fired the bomb," said prosecutor Nigel Sweeney. "The detonator charged, but the main fire did not."

A cloud of dust blew out of the bag, and most of the passengers appeared frightened and retreated. But one man, firefighter Angus Campbell, confronted the suspect, said Sweeney.

Sweeney said Campbell would testify that Mohamed said, "What's the matter? It's bread. It's not me, it was that (bag)." He said the mother involved would also testify.

Mohamed, 25; Muktar Said Ibrahim, 28; Yassin Omar, 26; Manfu Asiedu, 33; Adel Yahya, 24; and Hussain Osman, 28 — all from London — deny charges of conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause explosions.

Four men are suspected of actually attempting to detonate bombs; Asiedu allegedly lost his nerve and discarded his device, and Yahya allegedly left London six weeks before the attacks.

Sweeney said on Monday that it was pure luck that none of the devices exploded and no one was killed.

"We say that the failure of these bombs to explode owed nothing to the intentions of the defendants. It was simply the good fortune of the traveling public that this day they were spared," he said.

Sweeney said that Osman told police that the bombs were "a deliberate hoax in order to make a political point" and were not intended to kill. But Sweeney said forensic scientists had tested the mixture, and "in every experiment this mixture has exploded."

He argued that the contents of Osman's bag — including photo identification — disputed the hoax claim.

"If you are expecting to die, it does not matter at all if you have in your rucksack pictures of yourself," Sweeney said.

"If your are carrying out a hoax, hoping to get away, leaving behind a photograph of yourself with your fingerprints on it would seem to be rather unwise."
The jury saw video images of a man identified as Osman scrambling over a garden wall along the tracks after a bomb failed to explode on a subway train. Sweeney said Osman then climbed through a back window of a house, ran down the hall and out the front door, but not before encountering the woman who lived there.

"He said to her, 'I won't hurt you, I'm just passing through,"' Sweeney said.

Osman smiled and muttered to Omar as the jury watched the video.

Passengers on a third train reported hearing Omar shouting "in what appeared to be pain" after the detonator exploded on a device without setting off the main charge.

"He may have in fact been blown up into the air by the blast. Some said he staggered as he walked along the carriage after that," Sweeney said.

Jurors also saw images of Ibrahim on a No. 26 bus, and of passengers hastily evacuating after the detonator exploded.

Sweeney said Asiedu vehemently denied being part of the plot, and transcripts of his police interrogation run to a thousand pages.

"He was lying through his teeth at every stage. In those thousand pages, he lied on a truly epic scale," Sweeney said.

Prosecutors said the plot was activated well before the July 7 suicide attacks. The defendants allegedly bought 284 bottles of hydrogen peroxide — a chemical commonly used in bleaching and hair-coloring products — totaling 117 gallons between late April and early July 2005.

At a north London apartment rented by Omar, they boiled the chemical to a concentration of 70 percent to make it a more potent, Sweeney said. He said the bombs' main explosive charge was 70 percent liquid hydrogen peroxide and 30 percent chapati flour. Chapati is a type of Indian flat bread.

Sweeney said the detonators contained triacetone triperoxide (TATP), an explosive used by Palestinian suicide bombers and by Richard Reid, who attempted to detonate a shoe bomb on a U.S.-bound aircraft.