Carnage on a London Street

A terrorist bomb devastates Harrods

It was the last weekend before Christmas, and on the vast sales floors of Harrods, London's fashionable department store, thousands of customers roamed through acres of lavish displays. Suddenly, at 1:20 p.m. Saturday, a car parked outside exploded with a thunderous roar that could be heard all the way to Buckingham Palace, one mile away. As debris flew like shrapnel, black smoke soared into the air. Said Harry Aspey, a British reporter who was slightly hurt by the blast just as he was leaving the store: "It was as if the world had come to an end. Glass came raining down from the sky, it seemed, for minutes."

On the street, dead and injured shoppers lay crumpled beside torn bags spilling with holiday purchases. As firemen and ambulances sped to the scene, police closed off the area by stringing white plastic tape from lampposts. Across the side street where the blast occurred, Munna Malik, 33, had been serving customers in a clothing store near by when the explosion blew in the windows of his shop. He escaped through a rear fire exit and returned to the street, where he found three bodies and a dead dog beside the flaming remains of a car. Said Malik: "Only the legs of a policeman were recognizable as human. He had no face left."

The police, tragically, had been searching for the bomb when it went off, apparently detonated by remote control. Forty minutes earlier, a caller with an Irish accent had phoned the Samaritans, a voluntary organization, to announce: "Car bomb outside Harrods. Two bombs in Harrods." Scotland Yard was notified, and a team of police, including animal handlers and trained "sniffer" dogs, was dispatched to the store. At least five people died, and 91 were injured.

The caller to the Samaritans had identified himself as a member of the Irish Republican Army, and the police had no reason to doubt his word. It was the most brutal I.R.A. action in London since a double bombing in July 1982 that killed four troopers of the Queen's Household Cavalry in Hyde Park and seven members of the Royal Green Jackets Band in Regent's Park. It was not the first time the I.R.A. had chosen the holiday season to mount bombing campaigns in English cities. Following intelligence reports from Northern Ireland, London police had been warning citizens that they had better brace for a Christmas blitz.

Condemnation of the attack poured in from all sides. Labor Leader Neil Kinnock expressed his horror at "this insane assault upon innocent people." Calling the bombing "brutal and barbaric," Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared: "It is a crime against humanity, and at Christmas it is particularly cruel." Not surprisingly, the event stirred renewed calls for the death penalty for terrorist killings. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.