600 people in Burley in Leeds (where I live!) have been evacuated as army bomb disposal units did a controlled explosion to gain entry into a house as six houses were raided this morning in the hunt for the London bombers. Seems a bit odd as that suggests they blew the door up?! I'm not there at the moment as am at home in my parents house but when I left on sunday there were 4 armed police in Leeds train station which is the first time in my life I've seen armed police outside of airports! Bit pointless really having the armed police there. What were they gonna do? Shoot suspect packages? If they were for show (ie to settle the publics nerves after London) then the startled look on everyone's faces suggested they had the opposite effect!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4674463.stm

Related to that there is a large Muslim community where we live and one Mosque in Leeds has already been firebombed and I suspect things could get quite nasty depending on how the media create feelings towards Muslims. We've already had race riots fairly recently in Bradford and Oldham and this could reignite those tensions in a much bigger way...

And now the news is saying all four bombers died in the explosions. Looks like they were all suicide bombers and worse yet they were all British. The identification of one of the bombers led to the raid in Leeds so it looks like I was living 10 mins away from where one of them lived

quote:

Originally posted by George Smiley Bit pointless really having the armed police there. What were they gonna do? Shoot suspect packages? If they were for show (ie to settle the publics nerves after London) then the startled look on everyone's faces suggested they had the opposite effect!

yeah i agree, dont see the point at all

like in NYC, they were everywhere, cant see the point... but it looks pretty cool