If that's not as fishy as a kilo of rotting cod then I don't know what is!
Now the "news" is calling it and Al Quaeda-style attack based on the fact that it was organised and on a big scale, talk about weak!
British Prime Minister Tony Blair firmly blamed the series of London bombings on Islamic radicals, giving credence to an unverified claim of responsibility by an Al-Qaeda affiliate group."We know that these people act in the name of Islam," Blair said in a televised statement outside Downing Street.
"But we also know that the vast and overwhelming majority of Muslims here and abroad are decent and law-abiding people who abhor those who do this every bit as much as we do."
Blair said any attempt to break the British people's resolve would never succeed.
A previously unknown group calling itself the Organisation of Al-Qaeda Jihad in Europe claimed the attacks and said they were carried out "in response to the massacres carried out by Britain in
Iraq and
Afghanistan."
The group warned of further attacks to come, threatening Denmark and Italy as well as other "Crusader" nations.
Although the claim was unverified, some experts and observers said they were convinced the attacks were the work of Al-Qaeda sympathisers.
Blair urged Britons to be resolute after the atrocity.
"I think we all know what they are trying to do. They are trying to use the slaughter of innocent people to cow us, to frighten us out of doing the things that we want to do, trying to stop us from going about our business as normal, as we are entitled to do," he said.
"They should not and they must not succeed.
"When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated. When they seek to change our country or our way of life by these methods, we will not be changed," said Blair, who had raced back to London from the G8 summit in Scotland for an emergency meeting with government security advisors.
Thursday's bloodshed was similar in scope and nature to the March 11, 2004 train bombings in Madrid, which killed 191 people and were claimed by the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades-Al-Qaeda organization, named after the former head of Al-Qaeda military operations killed in the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
The Madrid blasts were widely seen as a revenge attack on Spain for the former conservative government's decision to send troops to Iraq in defiance of popular opposition.
The Socialist government elected three days after the Madrid carnage promptly fulfilled an election pledge to withdraw Spanish forces.
Britain, though, was not contemplating a similar move. Blair, who was re-elected in May, remains Washington's strongest ally in military operations in Iraq, where he maintains 7,500 troops to help a US-led coalition facing a relentless insurgency.
Italy and Denmark also have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Blair's assertion that Islamic extremists were to blame was backed by analysts.
Boaz Ganor, director general of
Israel's International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, said Thursday's attacks bore all the hallmarks of Al-Qaeda or one its satellites.
"If you look at the modus operandi, this is definitely the work of radical Islamic terrorist organisations with the attempt to achieve mass civilian casualties," he told AFP.
Mordechai Kedar, a counter-terrorism analyst for Israel's public television, said the attack was part of "the global jihad" and that the perpetrators would not shrink from striking elsewhere, including countries that opposed the Iraq war.
"Other countries such as France could be targets, even though they did not take part in the war in Iraq, because this is a clash of cultures," Kedar said.
British security analyst Charles Heyman said that the bombers were out to show that "we're still here. You haven't defeated us."
Telling the extremists that "our values will outlast theirs," Blair concluded: "This is a sad day for the British people. But we will hold true to the British way of life."
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