LONDON - Four small coordinated explosions hit London's bus and underground train network on Thursday, injuring one person, exactly 2 weeks after bombers killed more than 50 people in the British capital.
The attacks took place at around 1 p.m. (1200 GMT), briefly terrifying passengers fearing a repeat of the carnage of July 7.
But it soon became clear they had either failed altogether or lacked the lethal sophistication of the earlier bombs.
London police chief Ian Blair told reporters: "We know that we've had four explosions or attempts at explosions."
He said it was clear the devices had been intended to kill, but some appeared not to have gone off properly and only one person had been reported injured.
"Suddenly the door between my carriage and the next one burst open and dozens of people started rushing through and some were falling and there was clearly mass panic," said a passenger called Ivan at the central Warren Street underground station.
"An Italian young man ... said a man was carrying a rucksack (that) suddenly exploded, a minor explosion but enough to blow open the rucksack, and the man then made an exclamation as if something had gone wrong and ... everyone rushed off the carriage."
Prime Minister Tony Blair told reporters: "We know why these things are done. They are done to scare people ... We've got to react calmly."
Hunt For Suspects
Police sources said they were hunting several fugitives, according to BBC television.
On July 7, four young British Muslims detonated bombs in three packed London underground trains and a bus at morning rush hour, killing more than 50 people and shocking a capital hitherto spared al Qaeda-style attacks on civilians. Those bombings confronted Britain's people and politicians with the prospect that the country could be nurturing its own generation of the type of Islamist militants, loyal to Osama bin Laden, who had already inflicted carnage in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, in Bali and on Madrid's trains last year.
Despite their amateurishness, the latest attacks had striking parallels with the July 7 bombs, which also hit three underground trains and a bus in sites located loosely north, south, east and west of the centre. They took place just after a memorial for some of the victims.
"There is a resonance here," the police chief said. "Whether or not this is ... carried out by the same group of people... it's going to take a little longer before we can qualify that."
The attacks have forced the prime minister to defend himself against accusations that Britain's participation in the U.S. invasion of Iraq had made it a target for Islamic militants.
A poll published this week indicated that two-thirds of Britons think the July 7 bombings were linked to Iraq.
Blair denied he had put London at risk, saying: The people who are responsible for terrorist attacks are the terrorists."
Four bombers died in the July 7 attacks, leading most people to assume they had been suicide bombers.
British shares and the pound fell on Thursday, but recovered once it emerged the attacks were not on the scale of the earlier ones. Three of the underground network's lines were shut, a far cry from the complete standstill of 2 weeks ago.
Imitators at Work?
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The failure of the attack suggested it might not be the work of the organisers of July 7, whose bombs all exploded lethally.
Police chief Ian Blair said unexploded charges might still be left at some of the cordoned off sites: "This may represent a significant breakthrough ... there is obviously forensic material at these scenes which may be very helpful to us."
Navin Reddy, a risk analyst at Merchant International Group in London, said the attacks were "most probably the work of a copycat group of young, disaffected Muslims who were inspired by the events of July 7 to carry out an operation of their own".
Pakistani security forces have arrested a British Muslim, Haroon Rashid Aswad, believed to be linked to the July 7 bombings, according to Pakistani intelligence sources.
The July 7 bombs, which were claimed on the Internet by a little-known Islamic militant group, coincided with a summit of the Group of Eight leading industrialised nations in Scotland.
Although markets again rebounded from the latest shock, nervousness was growing about the prospect of more attacks.
"The security issues have just got 500 percent greater," said Jeremy Hodges, head of foreign exchange sales at Lloyds TSB bank. "It will reflect badly on the economy."
Passengers on at least two trains told of would-be bombers fleeing after small explosions -- which police said might have been detonators going off but failing to trigger a bomb.
One witness named Andrea who was on a train travelling through Oval station in south London told BBC television:
"It sounded like a balloon had popped but a lot louder and then we all moved to one end of the carriage. There was something on the floor and you could see something had exploded.
"They opened the door so we could move through to the next carriage and there was a guy still standing in the carriage.
"And then we pulled into Oval, we got off on the platform and the guy just ran and started running up the escalator.
"Everyone was screaming for someone to stop him. He ran past me and ... ran out of the station. In fact, he left a bag on the train."
Additional reporting by Richard Meares, Yara Bayoumy, Marie-Louise Gumuchian and Karin Strohecker
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