Timeline of Transit Attacks Is Revised

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ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

With us now is Duncan Campbell, who's special correspondent for the British daily the Guardian. He's in London.

Welcome to the program today.

Mr. DUNCAN CAMPBELL (Guardian): Thank you very much.

SIEGEL: First, you've worked in this country as well, so you're bilingual. I want you to help us with the statements today by the authorities. Are they saying, `We know who did this'?

Mr. CAMPBELL: Pretty much so. They're saying that they believe that four young men aged between 18 and 30, three of them from Leeds in West Yorkshire area, were responsible for essentially suicide bombings, and they've got pictures of the four of them on closed-circuit television. And one of the sources I was speaking to described them as looking as though they were going off on a hiking holiday. They all had haversacks on their back and they seemed relaxed and cheerful, and they all went off in four different directions.

SIEGEL: The inclusion of a young man as young as 18 might account for why his family would report him missing if he was that young.

Mr. CAMPBELL: That's right. He originally came to the attention of the police because his family called sometime after 10:00 that night and said they were worried because he'd gone down to London with some mates and--some friends, in bilingual terms--and they hadn't heard from him. And so the police dispatched what they call a family liaison officer, an FLO, to the family, as they did to all the families who had reported somebody missing. And what has happened since then is the family liaison officer role has now changed to a crime scenes role, and now they're looking at that house and the homes of two other young men for all kinds of forensic signs of bombs.

SIEGEL: I want you to take us back to last week and to the way the police have come to understand what happened, and perhaps what they didn't understand at first, that is the timeline of the explosions, the directions of all the trains. Some of this they got wrong the first day.

Mr. CAMPBELL: Yes. And what was interesting about it was the three bombs on The Underground all went off at more or less the same time. The bomb on the bus, which you probably have seen pictures of in America, went off nearly an hour later. That's the place where the body of the young man reported missing by his family was.

What I understand from our police sources tonight is that it would appear that the four of them were going off in four different directions--north, south, east and west. There was a fault on the northern line which would have taken the fourth person to the north, and that's why he may have boarded a bus. It may be he wasn't terribly familiar with London. He wasn't a Londoner, although he was British. And that's why you may have had the situation where you've got three coordinated bombs on The Underground, but one apparently stray bomb going off on a bus sometime later.

SIEGEL: And we might infer from that that the fourth bomb was not, in some way, preprogrammed to go off at the same time.

Mr. CAMPBELL: Or it may have been that because he couldn't get on to the Tube, he didn't start his timing device at the same time as the others and that that's why it wasn't coordinated in the same way, or it may just have been a malfunction. But I think the aim was to go north, south, east and west and cause the maximum form of damage and confusion rather than having them all in one area.

SIEGEL: One last quick point. The picture that you say that police have. This would be from a surveillance, a closed-circuit television camera at King's Cross station.

Mr. CAMPBELL: Yes, at King's Cross station. It seemed they rendezvoused in this town called Luton north of London. All of them got on the train together. They all had big haversacks, like kind of military haversacks that you see infantrymen carrying usually with a radio in it and a radio mast, that sort of size, from the top of the shoulder to the base of the spine, similar haversacks. They then--they're chatting together, and they're all seen together out at 20 past 8, which is less than half an hour before the explosion.

SIEGEL: Duncan Campbell, thank you very much for talking to us today.

Mr. CAMPBELL: OK.

SIEGEL: Duncan Campbell, who is special correspondent for the Guardian newspaper, speaking to us from Britain about the investigation into last week's London bombings.

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