They could have shot the man, several times, and then searched his bag.



It worked before.

Yes, the Met aren't always the best. I recall looking out of my old office window and seeing the square outside deserted except for a copper. I stood up and when he saw me he waved in a panicky fashion and came running up to our reception. Transpires they'd evacuated all the buildings round about but had forgotten to mention it to our floor in our building. He told me that it was too late for us to get out and I needed to get everyone in the corridor and away from the windows. We'd had numerous evacuations over the years but on this occasion I did worry - you could see in his face it was serious. Sure enough bomb exploded a few minutes later - luckily for us it was very small and about half a mile away, and I don't think we even heard it.

Sure, but you (esp. as a mod) can presumably get the difference between challenging an opinion in a forum debate, on the one hand, and sarcastically suggesting that I instead offer my services to the anti-terrorism branch.





I did offer a suggestion. In your haste to post drivel, you must have omitted reading it. To save you the bother, I'd have sent a police car to stop the coach, and sent an officer to speak with the suspect.





Yes. The officer speaking to the guy would have been shown the e-cigarette and gone away, satisfied, with another amusing anecdote for the canteen.





No, they really don't. They have to make a judgement, and got this one wrong.





Fair enough on the face of it, but if it was a bomber, wouldn't that be giving the game away?





Except that it wasn't a bomb threat.





I can understand why you repeatedly ignore my point that, if this chap HAD had a bomb, what they did gave him EVERY opportunity to detonate it. You can't think of an answer.



Then you yet again move on to your hobby horse of what I would have done "to stop the potential bomb going off". In the answer to that lies the answer to your own question. What could you do? Well, there is only one thing. Take the suspect out, de Menezes stylee, with a shot through the base of the brain so that he cannot depress any detonator. Even that is not guaranteed as he might have some other trip detonator. Obviously, that is 100% not even a possibility, given all you have is a random phone call, and he is (at least) more likely than not to be innocent of anything, so that leaves you with a position where (apparently) you seriously believe that there genuinely MAY be a bomb, but you don't have the option of taking the suspect out.



So, a man, perhaps innocent, but perhaps with bomb; doesn't know he's been rumbled; hasn't set the bomb off. If he is going to set it off on the bus, and accepting I can't take him out, then I would have to accept there is nothing I can do to stop him. Because he will have the bomb primed and ready to go off. (I would figure he is unlikely in the extreme to start assembling the bomb in his seat). Thus whatever I do, if it alerts him, *bang* it will inevitably be.



If on the other hand he is NOT planning to blow up the bus, then (and only then) do I have a chance, as if somehow I can get an officer to him quickly, then he maybe won't have time to make live his detonator. So getting the bus to pull over beyond the toll was arguably a sensible move, if with a cover story, but there should have been a plan to at least try to get someone on board at that point to disable the suspect, and at least give the passengers a chance.



Off the top of my head, another Megabus has broken down beyond the toll booths, and we are going to offer assistance ladies and gentlemen and pick up some more passengers. Something like that.



What is clear is that if the suspect HAD been a bomber then the chosen course of action gave him every opportunity to accomplish blowing up the bus. Unless you believe that letting the suspect sit there while the bus was over an hour or two slowly surrounded by the services was a reasonable method of preventing detonation. Sounds to me like the driver and the rest of the passengers on the bus had been written off as potential collateral damage, and they weren't prepared to risk the life of an officer by boarding the bus.

Thankfully, following decades of attending to bomb threats in the UK - genuine and hoax - the authorities have rather more idea of how to respond to the report of a bomb.





Erm, no they didn't. The person who reported the possibility of a bomb got it wrong. The police can only make their judgement based on the information available to them.



And I know you're far from stupid so I'm not sure why you're acting that way. OF COURSE the police treat a possible bomb threat, or report of a bomb as the worst case scenario. It's patently absurd to do otherwise.





Not really. Buses, trains, etc often stop for a variety of reasons. And it's no less risky than sending a couple of unarmed bobbies to stop to coach and walk up to the suspect. Face it, there's no easy way to attend to such a situation. They did the right thing in isolating the threat as soon as possible.





At the risk of stating the bleedin' obvious, they didn't know that at the time.





There will never be an easy way to detain someone in such a scenario. From memory when other security forces have stormed buses it's never ended well. Given the report stated there was smoke/vapour emitting from the bag, it would be reasonable to assume perhaps the device had failed (as per the 21/7 failures).



But you are correct, another alternative is to storm the bus with armed officers and fire first, ask questions later. Given the outraged response when all that actually happened was delays on the M6, thank god they used good judgement based on the information available and handled the incident in the manner they did.

Indeed, and equally thankfully, as a result, in practically all cases they don't make a complete arrse of it like they did here.





It was not a bomb threat, nor a report of a bomb. It was a report of a man apparently pouring liquid into something, which apparently produced smoke. Anyway, your hyperbole ("patently absurd"icon_wink.gif, while perhaps seeking to reassure yourself, does nothing to further your case. You too are not stupid, yet you seem to overlook the difficulty with your argument that if indeed that was what the police did, then we would be used to seeing this sort of scenario day in, day out. You may have not noticed, but actually - we don't. Mercifully, the faux pas was a one-off.





Face it? WTF? Who said there was?







Well yes, and I said as much. Though it hardly needs saying, now does it? Obviously, IF the suspect had indeed had a bomb, then the odds for the passengers were slim, whatever the police had chosen to do. A point you also ignore.







Or not, as that of course that was in no sense ever an alternative at all, a point which my reference to de Menezes should have penetrated through the thickest of left hemispheres.





A fair point. And if indeed that was the assumption, then stopping the bus and simply confronting the suspect as quickly as possible would again be the obvious strategy. And not giving him two hours to sort the problem out or find some other means of detonating the device.



I do share your relief that he did not in fact have a bomb, primarily because if he had, then the way the police chose to deal with it, all the bus passengers would likely be dead. And then questions [iwould[/i be raised as to why, if they genuinely believed he had a bomb, the police had done nothing at all to make any attempt to prevent him from detonating it.







Wow. That's the third

your muddled effort has prompted. Why on earth "thank god"? Since he did not have a bomb, then surely the way they handled it turns out to be irrelevant, as he was never going to harm anybody anyway (unless you fear passive vapour).



If he HAD had a bomb, can you please tell me what it was that the police did which improved the chances of the passengers, and reduced, in any way at all, the chances of the bomb being detonated? There may be something I have missed.

Let's leave it there. I have a rule: if there are more than 40 quotes in a post it's time to walk away.

Everyones an expert in hindsight, hats off to the police for responding even though it was an electronic cig, could have been something else.



I went on holiday in 2009 and was in the airport toilets as I was pretty nervous, I looked under a cubicle door to see if anyone was in and there was a fellow with his feet the wrong way messing with a bag, he opened the door and left and I went in, he was Asian and when I went into the toilet he had left an empty Robinsons orange bottle in there which had melted around the rim quite bad, I thought it was a bit weird.



He must have left it in there as I'd been in that cubicle 2mins before I came back.



He was travelling alone and looked very nervous and was messing about with his laptop and bag.



I told security about him and nothing was done, nothing happened as about 5 minutes later his wife and kids joined him which sort of eased my mind as I was ready to throw him off the plane, nothing happened and me and the mrs had a lovely holiday in Cuba and the bloke and his family were in our hotel, me and the mrs just joked about it after.



I won't admit to being parnoid even though nothing happened, just vigilant.



Better safe than sorry.

So you can't count?

That's correct. Can't count. What of it?

I was looking for the post with more than 40 quotes.

It's in there. Keep looking.



Let me know when you find it.