LONDON, Aug 19: Police have ‘an intuitive view’ of a link between the group that carried out the July 7 bombings in London and the one that tried but failed two weeks later to repeat them, Metropolitan Police commissioner Ian Blair said on Friday. Mr Blair bluntly refused to resign over the police shooting of a Brazilian wrongly suspected of being a suicide bomber.

“No, not at all,” said Mr Blair when asked in a BBC interview whether he might stand down in the face of a furore over the point-blank killing of Jean Charles de Menezes the day after the failed July 21 bombings.

In another interview, Mr Blair reiterated his worry that a third cell, if not more, was waiting in the wings to carry out another attack on the British capital.

“Although we have not yet established any direct links, intuitively there are such similarities between the methodology and the equipment (of the July 7 and July 21 teams) that we must think there is a possibility of others,” he said in the interview with the Evening Standard newspaper.

Mr Blair played down talk of a single mastermind behind the attacks, which the government has said bore the “hallmarks” of Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network which carried out the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001.

“The question is more around (such questions as) was there some training that was held in common, is there some set of instructions somewhere... These are things that the investigation will continue on.”

He added: “At the moment we have nothing that links the two groups, but the investigation still continues and there is an intuitive view that says that each group of four are so similar that we must have concerns, and we do.”

Fifty-six people died in near-simultaneous morning rush-hour blasts on July 7 on three subway trains and, about an hour later, a double-decker bus.—AFP