Thousands of racing fans were expected to be stranded in the vicinity of the race course through the night. Authorities therefore never assume that failure to find a bomb, or finding one and exploding it under controlled conditions, makes an area safe.
The strategy is to injure or kill rescue teams and bomb squad members remaining on the scene after others are evacuated. The IRA has at times planted multiple bombs, with one or two timed to explode after another has gone off or has been destroyed. Bomb squads, already on hand, immediately began their search, which led to the controlled explosions. Track officials, who anticipated this possibility along with everyone else, already had an evacuation plan and executed it right after learning of the coded telephone threats.
It is watched and wagered on by millions throughout Europe and is especially popular in Ireland.īut as an estimated 250 million Europeans turned on their televisions today to watch the race, they saw instead throngs of people, including the BBC television team broadcasting the event, in confusion outside the course. The Grand National, comparable to the Kentucky Derby, is 150 years old. "They must know that this can only harden our resolve never to make concessions to terrorists," Prime Minister John Major said in a statement today. On Friday, bomb threats of still undetermined origin closed down two of central London's packed railroad-subway stations, sending thousands of commuters in search of other transportation and virtually gridlocking several square miles of the city.
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The IRA has admitted to planting a bomb along one of Britain's busiest north-south rail lines, halting train traffic for almost a full day, and to placing two bombs last week on the congested highway route between London and Birmingham, producing road closures and traffic jams that continued for 30 hours. Law enforcement authorities warned several weeks ago that the IRA - the Northern Ireland-based guerrilla organization that seeks the north's reunification with the Republic of Ireland - probably would stage high-profile attacks to attract attention and cause disruption before Britain's May 1 general election. All three were reported to have been harmless. Bomb squads this evening detonated a third package. At about that time, bomb squads at the race course at Aintree, near Liverpool, carried out two "controlled explosions" in main buildings at the track, suggesting that they had found suspicious packages. EST), the point at which the steeplechase event would probably have been winding up. The warnings said that bombs would explode at about 3:50 p.m. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for today's threats. The coded warnings were believed to have come from the Irish Republican Army, which has waged a successful two-week campaign to disrupt highways and rail lines around England. One of the world's oldest and most famous horse-racing events - the Grand National steeplechase - was canceled today a half hour before its scheduled start after bomb threats forced the evacuation of roughly 60,000 people from the track and stands.
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