CELL LINKED TO 7 JULY BOMBERS, TRYING TO COMMIT MASS MURDER Given the apparent similarities with 7 July, police are working on the assumption that the bombers were trying a repeat operation. According to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, it was an attempt to commit mass murder that went wrong. There were no casualties and no obvious major event was upstaged (the previous attacks coincided with the G8 summit), but the timing was suspicious, exactly two weeks after 7 July. Both bombing waves were clearly co-ordinated, as the Tube explosions were almost simultaneous on both days. I said my prayers and waited for it to happen."Mr Mohellabi, originally from Paris and now living in Walthamstow, east London, was one of 20 people in the carriage when the device went off.
I have an English girlfriend and friends."'We smelt burning wires. People started running for their lives'Sofiane Mohellabi was on the train on his way home from a job interview: "We smelt burning wires and [something] like burning tyres People started running for their lives and screaming. "I was trying to go to my job as a cleaner at Victoria station," he said. "The police asked me what's in your bag, what are you doing here. They asked me what my name was, where I lived, what my job was. They looked in my bag, in my trousers, everything."Mr Laarbi, a Muslim from Morocco who lives in Stamford Hill, north London, said he was not angry "They're just doing their job," he said "But this is my city too. "We saw police go into the station and later they were searching the bag of a man who got into the back of their unmarked car.
There was no struggling and he got into the car by himself and he wasn't handcuffed." Ms Sinclair said the man was tanned, with long, dark hair and was carrying a red rucksack.Crowds of confused office workers on their lunch break found themselves stopped and searched as the police operation got under way. Ahmed Laarbi, 29, says he was walking near Warren Street Tube station at about 2.10pm when he was stopped and searched. She said two British Transport Police took away a man in their car. Police worked their way through the lunchtime crowds clearing bemused drinkers from the pubs, pints in their hands, and closing coffee bars with the staff still inside, trapped within the cordon.Michelle Sinclair, 24, was sitting in a restaurant near Warren Street Tube when police started sealing off the area. Hundreds of onlookers, many evacuated from their places of work, pushed at the barrier to get a closer look.
