Paul Rogers: Smoke is yet to clear over the identity and motivation of marathon bombers

Shortly after midnight on July 27, a large crowd was enjoying a pop concert led by a popular group, Jack Mack and the Heart Attack, when three powerful pipe bombs in a rucksack detonated.

All were surrounded by nails and the impact was terrifying as people ran for cover.

Two people were killed and over a hundred were wounded and there was an immediate suspicion that a radical Middle Eastern group must have been responsible.

This was a similar reaction to the far more devastating attack on the Alfred P Murrah federal offices in Oklahoma City the previous year which killed 168 people and wounded nearly 700, but both attacks turned out to be of domestic origin.

Timothy McVeigh was tried for the Oklahoma bomb and after the Atlanta attack the FBI focussed on Eric Robert Rudolph as the main suspect.

Rudolph evaded capture and went into hiding for several years, finally being arrested in May 2003. He pleaded guilty to the Centennial Park attack and to three other bombings, including one of an abortion clinic and is serving life imprisonment.

In his immediate reaction to the Boston Marathon bombs on Monday evening, President Obama was cautious in using the term “terror” mainly because people take this to mean an Islamist attack in the US context.

Given the amount of evidence available, including copious CCTV coverage, it is likely that the FBI and police will get leads on the perpetrators very quickly, but irrespective of who was responsible, the attacks themselves were undoubted acts of terror. They were timed to detonate when scores of runners were about to finish, and their intention was to have an impact and create fear and terror in a much wider group of people than those directly affected.

This does not in any sense mean that the Boston bombings had an international dimension and media reaction this time has been much more cautious than in the past, taking the lead from Obama, but also because of the early and thoroughly misplaced media reaction to the appalling carnage cause by the Norwegian, Anders Breivik, two years ago.

Breivik killed eight people in bomb attacks central Oslo and then 69 young people at a camp on Utoya Island.

Until his guilt became clear there was a widespread assumption that it was an al-Qaida operation, hence the caution after Boston.

Major sporting events have long been targets for paramilitary groups, mainly because of the huge publicity that can be generated through the presence of the mass media.

Sometimes international events are targeted because of the presence of specific nationalities, one of the worst examples being the kidnapping of Israeli athletes by a radical Palestinian group at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. The attack led to the deaths of all eleven Israelis and a German police officer when an attempt to free the athletes went disastrously wrong

British experience has been at a much lower level, although huge precautions were put in place for last summer’s Olympic Games, including a helicopter carrier moored in the Thames and anti-aircraft missile batteries on buildings near the Olympic Park.

One British event that was disrupted was the Grand National in 1997, at the height of the Provisional IRA’s bombing campaign in England. The race was postponed when a telephone warning was made just 50 minutes before it was due to start.

From what is known of the Boston attack, the bombs appear to have been crude devices but they had their impact because of the density of the crowds.

An initial analysis may point to a lone individual and there are parallels with the bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in the gay district of London’s Soho on 30 April 1999.

That nail bomb had a terrible impact, killing three people and wounding over 60. The perpetrator was David Copeland, a neo-Nazi previously responsible for two bombings in multi-ethnic districts of London. Copeland admitted the offences and was jailed for life the following year with a minimum sentence of 30 years.

Questions have been raised over the London Marathon this coming weekend and the UK counter-terror organisations will be coordinating closely with the FBI and Boston police.

Cancellation is very unlikely and would only be seriously discussed if it turned out that the Boston atrocities had an international dimension and that the group responsible also saw the UK as an enemy.

Even then, cancellation would only be considered if there was high-quality intelligence that an attack was planned.

Otherwise there will most likely be an increased level of policing with the race going ahead as planned.