News Brief – July 22, 2005
According to Reuters, the man shot dead by police at a London Underground station on Friday was not one of the four bombers who tried to attack the city's transport system the day before, Sky Television reported.
This is what I am picking up from security sources that the man who was shot this morning at Stockwell tube wasn't one of those four bombers that police are hunting," Sky reporter Martin Brunt told Reuters.
London's Metropolitan Police said only: "the gentleman shot at Stockwell today has yet to be identified, so it would be impossible to link him to anything at this stage."
Police shot the man a day after four attempted bomb attacks in London and 15 days after bombers killed more than 50 people in the city.
According to eyewitnesses, plainclothes police chased the man through a subway station, wrestled him to the floor of a train car and then shot him in the head before shocked commuters. Police later said that the shooting was "directly linked" to the bomb attacks on London's transit system
However, police have now admitted that the man was not a "suicide bomber" and have yet presented nothing to prove that he was associated with the terrorists themselves. In fact this writer believes that he could just as easily have been a petty theif or drug dealer, who got in the way and ran when confronted by armed police.
And the fact that he is now dead means he cannot argue with anything he might be accussed of.
Sky initially said the dead man was not linked to the bombings but later clarified that he was not one of the bombers, leaving open the possibility that he may have been connected to the attacks in some other way.
However the first eyewitness accounts to reach the mainstream media said the man looked more like a scared animal than a suicide bomber. Yet after a couple of hours that changed after another witnesses, Anthony Larkin, told the BBC that the man appeared to have "a bomb belt and wires coming out."
Thereafter the "suicide bomber" began to change as we recieved word from a reader about the supposed "eyewitness" Anthony Larkin. A quick google of name Anthony Larkin revealed one who happened to work for the Metropolitan Police's forensics deptartment.
Of course this may be no more than a coincidence, we leave you to decide.
Last updated 23/07/2005
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