Jury Sees Tape From London Bomb Scare

Video Is Said to Show Suspect on Subway Trying to Fire Device

LONDON, Jan. 16 -- The grainy security video showed a London subway car crowded with midday riders, a man with a backpack among them. He looked around, then turned his back toward a woman with a child in a stroller. Suddenly, a large puff of dust shot out of his pack, and panic erupted among the other passengers.

British prosecutors played the video to a jury in London on Tuesday. The man, they said, was Ramzi Mohammed, 25, one of six men on trial for conspiracy to murder commuters that day, July 21, 2005. The dust, they said, was residue from a bomb hidden in his backpack. Its detonator fired and caused the puff of dust, prosecutors said, but the shrapnel-laced main charge failed to explode.

Prosecutor Nigel Sweeney told jurors that three other bombs carried onto subway trains and a bus that day also failed to explode, preventing a repeat of a nearly identical attack two weeks earlier, July 7, that had killed 52 commuters and wounded about 700 others.

With the four July 7 bombers dead, the six July 21 defendants are the first people to face trial on charges relating to a pair of incidents that were the first major Islamic extremist attacks on British soil and created chaos in one of the world's biggest cities. The attacks spurred a continuing national debate over how young Muslim men, all either British citizens or residents, could have become so radicalized that they could have plotted mass murder in Britain.

The video footage played at the high-security Woolwich Crown Court showed panicked commuters, still jittery two weeks after the July 7 bombings, running off the train at the next stop, while an off-duty firefighter remained on board to confront the man with the backpack. Sweeney told the jury that Mohammed dropped his load to the train floor and told the firefighter, "What's the matter -- it is bread," before running away into the chaos on the train platform.

Mohammed and his five co-defendants -- Muktar Said Ibrahim, 28; Yassin Hassan Omar, 26; Hussain Osman, 28; Manfo Asiedu, 33; and Adel Yahya, 24 -- watched silently as Sweeney played the surveillance footage. They have denied the charges.

All six are London residents originally from Africa and face charges of conspiracy to commit murder. Eleven other people charged with helping them, or with failing to alert police to their plot, face trial later this year.

Britain has perhaps the world's highest concentration of closed-circuit surveillance cameras in public places. Those cameras were a critical tool used by police to identify the suspects in the July 7 and July 21 incidents and trace their movements on the day of the attacks and leading up to them.

The footage played in court showed the man identified as Mohammed running from the Oval subway station into a nearby housing project, where he pulled off a hooded sweatshirt with "New York" emblazoned across the front. Sweeney told jurors that this was a reference to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, which included the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York. Mohammed was arrested several days after the July 21 incidents.

Sweeney also showed jurors photos of the abandoned backpack oozing a substance that police explosives specialists later identified as hydrogen peroxide. In the trial's opening session Monday, Sweeney told the jurors that the backpack bombs carried onto three subway trains and a bus that day were made from hydrogen peroxide mixed with flour for making chapati, an Indian flatbread.

Jurors on Tuesday also saw surveillance footage allegedly showing Ibrahim attempting to detonate his bomb on the upper level of a double-decker bus, causing panicked passengers to flee.

They also saw footage alleging to show Omar entering and leaving the subway train he is accused of trying to blow up.

Sweeney told jurors that as Omar ran away from the Warren Street station, he approached a woman in full Muslim dress and demanded that she take him home.

"When she declined, he said words to the effect of, 'What kind of Muslim are you not helping another Muslim?' " Sweeney said.

The trial is expected to last three or four months.