UK police make ‘significant arrest’ after London subway terror attack
Police on Saturday grilled an 18-year-old man as a “very significant” suspect in Friday’s London subway bombing — and at the same time raided the home of an elderly couple once honored by the queen for fostering young Syrian refugees.
The couple, from Sunbury-on-Thames, a commuter town 11 miles southwest of London, was identified in numerous reports as Ronald and Penelope Jones.
They have fostered more than 250 children, including refugees from Iraq and Syria, and in 2010 were honored as Members of the Order of the British Empire by the Queen Elizabeth II in a Buckingham Palace ceremony.
“I just like to be able to help people,” Penelope Jones had explained to the BBC at the time.
A family friend, Serena Barber, praised her, telling Britain’s Press Association: “She takes everyone. She doesn’t turn anyone away.”
Some 200 of the Joneses’ neighbors were evacuated during the raid, and investigators searched the couple’s property well into the night.
Authorities did not say what connection the home may have had to the morning rush-hour explosion on a train car at the London Underground’s Parson Greens station, which had been crowded with commuters and schoolkids.
The homemade bomb, which was contained in a plastic bucket and included a timing device, only partially exploded into a fireball. Thirty people suffered burns or injuries as they fled the scene.
By Saturday night, just three of the injured remained in central London hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries.
ISIS has claimed that one of its operatives planted the bomb.
Four hours before Saturday’s raid on the Joneses’ home, investigators grabbed the 18-year-old in the departure lounge of a major ferry port in Dover — minutes before boats bound for the French cities of Calais and Dunkirk were to depart, according to the Sunday Times of London.
“This is a very significant arrest,” Interior Minister Amber Rudd told reporters.
Officials did not elaborate on the teen’s possible role in the bombing or on any connection to the Joneses’ home. He was being questioned in London and had not been charged by late Saturday.
London was to stay on the highest level of terror alert through the weekend, officials said.
Military personnel were stationed at sensitive locations, including at nuclear plants and throughout the subway and rail system — not only in London, but across England, Scotland and Wales, British transportation officials told the BBC.
Sources told the BBC that surveillance-camera images show the person suspected of planting the bomb. London’s Underground is extensively covered by surveillance cameras.
Investigators were also being aided by the remains of the bomb itself. It is “quite unusual” for a bomb to be found relatively intact, David Videcette, a former counter-terrorism detective in the Metropolitan Police, told the BBC.
That means investigators may be able to find evidence such as fibres and DNA, he explained.
The bomb was believed to have been made with an explosive called triacetone triperoxide (TATP), a compound nicknamed the “Mother of Satan” due to both its power and instability.
TATP was also used in the coordinated July 2005 suicide attacks that killed 52 people on three London subways and a bus.
It was more recently used by terror plotters in Barcelona, where it detonated prematurely.
A full explosion would very likely have been deadly, as a single ounce of TATP will blow the doors off a car, the BBC noted.