British police thwarted a pair of apparent terrorist attacks in central London's crowded theater district Friday, defusing bombs fashioned from gasoline, gas cylinders and nails and hidden inside two parked Mercedes sedans. Police said that if the explosives had detonated, they could have killed or injured hundreds of people.Police found the first car -- a pale green Mercedes parked outside the upscale, three-story Tiger Tiger nightclub near Piccadilly Circus -- by accident. An ambulance crew responding to an unrelated call at 1:30 a.m. noticed smoke in the vehicle and alerted authorities.
According to British television reports, a police officer found a cellphone inside the vehicle that was to be the bomb's trigger and turned it off.
The second car, a blue Mercedes, was parked nearby about the same time. But around 2:30 a.m., the car was ticketed by London's ever-efficient parking enforcers and an hour later was towed to an underground garage at Hyde Park, police said. It was only many hours later, after news of the first bomb blanketed the airwaves, that workers notified police that the towed car reeked of gasoline.
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