Young man is charged in London subway attack

Suspect accused of attempted murder in station bombing.

An 18-year-old man was charged with attempted murder Friday related to the bombing last week on the London subway system that prompted a stampede and left more than 30 people wounded, British police said.

The suspect, Ahmed Hassan, is also accused of using TATP, a banned explosive, in the attack on Sept. 15 while the train was at Parsons Green station in southwest London.

Five other suspects have been arrested since the attack; two remained in custody without charge, while three others were released, including a Syrian refugee who was freed Thursday and a 17-year-old freed Friday.

No one was killed when the improvised bomb exploded on a subway train full of schoolchildren and professionals on their way to work, but the attack revived memories of the explosions on the city’s transportation network in 2005 that killed more than 50 people.

The Parsons Green attack was the fifth terrorist episode in Britain this year and the first to target the heavily trafficked London Underground network known as the Tube, the oldest railway of its kind in the world.

The makeshift device, hidden within a plastic bucket that had been placed in a supermarket shopping bag, looked rudimentary and failed to explode properly, but it could have caused far more damage, London’s top police official said Friday.

“That was a very, very dangerous bomb,” said Cressida Dick, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, in an interview with LBC, a British radio station. “It partially detonated. It had a large quantity of explosive, and it was packed with shrapnel. It could have been so much worse.”

Hassan was arrested Saturday morning in the departures area of a port in Dover, in Southeast England. He had been living with British foster parents, Ronald Jones, 88, and Penelope Jones, 71, in Sunbury-on-Thames, a suburb west of London. According to neighbors, Hassan had aroused few suspicions of untoward behavior, apart from getting involved in a fight.

“The police brought him to the house a few weeks ago after he got into an altercation, but I don’t think they thought anything of it,” a neighbor, Nicola Rider, 43, said in an interview earlier this week. “I mean, he’s 18. We all get into trouble at that age.”

A second neighbor, Rick Worth, 46, said: “You didn’t really see the boy out and about much. We mainly just saw him coming in and out of the house. He was quiet and kept to himself. You know, head down, never smiled.”