What Might the Purpose of the New Attacks on Great Britain be?

There are many things that are happening and may have happened that terrorists may be using as an excuse or opportunity to attack:

• Salman Rushdie was recently Knighted
• The new Prime Minister took office yesterday
• The new Prime Minister is Scottish ( but not traveling through Glasgow this weekend)
• Its close to the 7/7 attack anniversary
• All three attacks have so far been attempted at areas that had high concentrations of people
• Tony Blair Became a Middle East Envoy
• The US and UK signed a Defense Trade Cooperation Treaty on June 26th
• Wimbledon is almost half way through the tournament
• School Holidays had just started today and the airport was unusually busy

None of these things justifies an attack for any reason, but terrorists may use the opportunity for symbolistic reasons, for leveraging past terror attacks to raise the level of fear. They may even use it to motivate the members or people participating in the attack.

One witness to the Glasgow attack indicated that one of the people that got out of the car was a large South Asian man, on fire and speaking gibberish. Both people were trying to throw petroleum around and get into the back of their green landrover. Many people think they might have been trying to get at more petroleum or some other device. This definitely does not appear to have been an accident and then men were not doing something mundane like trying to get at incontinence supplies. The burning man remained on fire while he attempted to get into the vehicle a second time. Authorities extinguished the fire with a fire extinguisher and then arrested the man.

The US has indicated they do not have any information about potential attacks here in the US, but aiports around the US will increase their security presence as a precaution.