Bomb strikes London’s vulnerable underground
LONDON — Alex Ojeda-Sierra, 13, was on the train to school with a friend when they heard screaming and saw passengers running past.
Unknown to them, a bomb had exploded in another car.
“I dropped my bag and we started running,” Alex, who attends the London Oratory School, said from a wheelchair at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where he
was treated for facial bruises and sprains when he tripped in the panicky crush of fleeing commuters.
The bomb, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag concealed in a bucket, exploded at 8:20 a.m. Friday at the height of the morning rush. The explosion and panic left 29 people injured, but none were killed.
It was the fifth terrorist attack in Britain this year and the first to hit London at its most vulnerable point — mass transit — since the 2005 bombings that killed 55.
The Islamic State asserted responsibility for the bomb hours later in a message on its Amaq news site that said a “detachment” of its disciples had carried out the attack — language that suggested more than one assailant.
Prime Minister Theresa May, calling the blast a “cowardly attack,” said the national threat level had been raised to “critical,” the highest.
The bomb exploded just after the train drew into Parsons Green, an elevated station in a quiet and affluent part of West London. It burned at least one passenger, who was carried away on a stretcher, and led to a stampede that injured others.
Mayor Sadiq Khan, a face of resolve after the earlier attacks, issued a defiant statement on Facebook that hinted at how terror attacks had become a new normal in the capital.
“Our city utterly condemns the hideous individuals who attempt to use terror to harm us and destroy our way of life,” Khan wrote. “As London has proven again and again, we will never be intimidated or defeated by terrorism.”
Police were combing through the extensive CCTV footage that blankets all Underground stations, with particular attention to the handful of stations west of Parsons Green.
The device did not appear to detonate properly, as the bucket, the bag and a series of wires all remained intact even after the explosion.