A teen was accused for a leaving a homemade bomb filled with deadly ball-bearing shrapnel with the intent to endanger life.
Damon Smith, 19-years old, a computing student, was arrested near London Metropolitan University’s campus entrance in Holloway, North London, where he was just three weeks into an IT course. He was accused of packing a bag with explosives and deadly ball-bearing shrapnel and leaving it on a Jubilee train with a detonator clock timed to go off 13 minutes later.
The prosecutor Jonathan Rees QC told the court, on October 20, Smith was seen boarding the Jubilee Line train at Southwark that morning, then got off at London Bridge at 10:49 am, leaving behind a backpack allegedly containing the bomb set to explode minutes later at 11:02 am.
He was caught on CCTV wearing brown hoodie and jeans. He was casually leafing through a text book as unsuspecting commuters sat nearby reading newspapers.
“The CCTV shows that there were at least 10 passengers travelling in the train,” Rees said.
Smith then headed to Holloway, where he was just three weeks into an IT course at London Metropolitan University.
Passengers spotted the backpack unattended shortly before 11 am and alerted the driver, Adrian Clarke, who first thought the bag was lost property and took it into the cabin with him.
On his way to North Greenwich station, Clarke that there is a wire poking out of a clock, then he alerted the authorities. By the time they reached North Greenwich, the station was already evacuated. Explosives Unit and also SO15 of Counter Terrorism Division of the Metropolitan Police were put in place.
The device was set to go off at about 11:02am. “Had the device worked, it seems it would have gone off while passengers were being ordered off the platform,” Rees said.
After Smith was arrested, he said the device was intended to work as a smoke bomb and had been left as a prank. But the prosecution said the device, which had partially detonated, had been designed to endanger lives.
According to court hearings, Damon Smith had an interest in Islam, guns and gambling, and collected pictures of extremists including the alleged mastermind of the 2015 Paris terror attacks.
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