Tracking terrorists via e-imagery

Submitted by Gloria (United States), Apr 21, 2013 at 19:04

"To the best of my knowledge, the Tsarnaevs were the first terrorists to be tracked down via still and video pictures."

Actually, there was another instance of tracking terrorists via pictures which, I think, was a job well done by the London police. Maybe even more impressive than tracking down the Boston bombers. But since there were no casualties, it's an incident easy to forget:

Two weeks after the 7/7 bombing a group of Muslim men tried to recreate the exact same scenario in London on July 21, 2005. Fortunately, they were not successful because only the detonator caps exploded and not the bombs themselves. When that happened all the terrorists ran away. But by July 29, one week later, the police had arrested all four of the main bombing suspects from the July 21st attempted bombings.

How did they do that? Well, along with other standard police work, they were primarily able to apprehend the men by using the CCTV photos that were captured on the three subways and one bus:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/05/london_blasts/investigation/html/suspects.stm

If you want a more detailed view of the event see Wikipedias report: 21 July 2005 London bombings.

Kudos to Boston law enforcement, they did an excellent job, but let's not forget the early contribution to counter-terrorism made by the London police.

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