LONDON, April 7: Yet another gremlin has gate-crashed the planning for Saturday’s wedding of Prince Charles to Camilla Parker Bowles, this time in the form of an undercover reporter taking a make-believe bomb into one of the venues to expose security flaws.
In a brazen stunt, a journalist from Britain’s best-selling newspaper, The Sun, posing as a delivery man, breezed into Windsor Castle and drove around the grounds freely in a rented white van.
Inside the van was a brown box cheekily marked “bomb”, yet reporter Alex Peake said none of the police officers guarding the castle, just west of London — where Queen Elizabeth II was in residence at the time — were suspicious.
“It was all absurdly easy... Had it (the fake bomb) been real, it could have devastated the castle and caused carnage — even killing the queen,” Peake reported.
London’s Metropolitan Police, responsible for guarding the royal family, launched an “immediate inquiry” into the embarrassing breakdown in security, the second at Windsor Castle within two years.
“I am concerned. I am certainly irritated,” said Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, who revealed that one officer, who was not identified, had been “moved” to other duties.
“I do not want to prejudge this because we have a disciplinary process to go through, but it looks as though somebody has done something pretty stupid.”
“Perhaps it is a wake-up call, but I would not expect anyone in my organization to need a wake-up call.”
The Ford van, with the Thrifty rent-a-car logo on its side, recalled the one that Timothy McVeigh used in the April 1995 bombing of the US federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people and injured more than 500.—AFP
