LONDON, Sept 7: British police staged a mock attack on an underground train in the heart of London on Sunday to prepare for what the country’s top policeman has said is an almost inevitable strike.

Fire engines raced, sirens blaring, to Bank station underneath the Bank of England shortly before noon as firefighters struggled into green protective suits and descended to aid “victims” of the simulated chemical attack.

Gas-masked police moved in to cordon off the area.

“We’ve got to test our response to what could happen in the event of a terrorist attack... whether its an attack at Heathrow (airport) or a chemical or gas attack on the London Underground,” said Transport Secretary Alastair Darling.

Britain’s top police officer Sir John Stevens told Reuters last week that Britain faced a threat from suicide bombers and said his London force was on its “highest level of alert”.

Darling confirmed a report in the Sunday Times newspaper that there was a plan, which the paper called Operation Sassoon, to evacuate parts of London to “rest and reception areas” in the surrounding countryside in the event of a serious threat.

“We’re looking at various scenarios where we might need to evacuate people around an airport or part of the city, although clearly it’s a scenario of last resort,” he told Reuters.

With the second anniversary of the Sept 11 attacks on the United States on Thursday, Washington’s top ally London is considered a prime target.

“There is a real and constant threat of terrorism,” Mike Bowron of the City of London Police said at Sunday’s exercise. “This is the centre of one of the world’s most influential capitals.”

The drill, which lasted several hours, involved about 500 police, firefighters and paramedics rescuing about 60 “casualties” from a train trapped in a tunnel. The theoretical chemical was described as “something like Sarin”.

Dressed in orange decontamination capes, the “victims” were then carried or herded up onto the street where they were washed down in yellow tents.

There has never been a suicide bombing in Britain, but anti-terror police have arrested more than 300 people since the September 11 attacks, with deadly ricin poison found in a London flat.—Reuters