- Birmingham city centre evacuated:
"No vehicles are being allowed past the inner ring road into the city centre, and there have also been reports of controlled explosions by police."Fingers crossed for the Brummies, eh?
Update (23:30): BBC now reporting that 20,000 people have been evacuated.
Update 2: A Brum blog reports calm, just 10 minutes from Broad Street, the heart of the scare - but no updates for a while. Last entry at 22:45 - "no panic really — just disappointed Friday night revellers and disgruntled (but safe) Brummies." Let's hope so.
Scribbles is investigating...
Update 3: West Midlands police statement:
"The bomb disposal squad has carried out 4 controlled explosions on a bus in Corporation Street, near the Square Pegg public house. This turned out to be a false call. The bomb disposal squad are however, still investigating another suspicious package in the Broad Street area.Sunday update: Scribbles reports back - and check the comments to this post for some interesting rumour and speculation. Seems an odd one, last night...
"We would stress that there is nothing to suggest that this intelligence is connected with the incidents in London."
5 Comments:
You can get quite a bit of info from BBC Radio West Midlands too (and you don't get the naff music):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/networks/wm/live.shtml
'Twas weird last night. I was in a bar in Selly Oak when they turned their screens over from the rugby to Sky News. Lots of confusion ensued as it was impossible to get audio on half of the TVs - and the DJ refused to take a break.
For a lot of people there was more upset than worry - that their night out had been trashed. My housemate was hoping to celebrate his birthday in the centre of town. Instead, we got trashed at home thanks to the wonders of the off licence.
In th drunkeness, I wrote something quite confused on my blog. I think it means I won't be deterred.
When I got up this morning, the BBC had an article stating that bombs were "probably the work of Britons" and not foreign extremists. When I went back to that page a few minutes ago, it had been replaced by a story about people praying for the victims. It briefly mentioned that UK terrorists might be behind the attacks, with the caveat that 3,000 British citizens have trained at al-Qaeda camps.
There doesn't seem to be a trace of the original article.
Something shifty is going on. Newspapers seem confused about whether to point at Britons or Eastern Europeans. And I have heard over and over on radio reports that last nights events in Birmingham were "not connected" to the bombings in London.
How not connected? Unless the threat came from a body entirely seperate from Al-Qaeda (I always want to put that name in speech marks), then of course they were connected.
That we might have had the pleasure of a different terrorist cell (bunch of murders) after us doesn't seperate events. The only thing that does that is that we had no injuries or loss of life last night.
Don't understand what they are trying to tell me by using the word "unconnected".
Another thing, if it was a specific threat, then why kick everyone out of the centre of brum along several streets?
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