It is a sunny Saturday afternoon and the residents of Brixton are dipping in and out of the shops, picking up an item here and a newspaper there, when a bag containing a nail-bomb blasts them off their feet, maiming men, women and children. Fast forward to Brick Lane, where there is a large Bangladeshi community, and a week later there is another nail bomb.
Last night it happened again, this time not in a racially sensitive area, but in a well-known gay bar, the Admiral Duncan, in Soho.
Reports last night suggested that this was also a nail bomb, and so serious are these attacks being treated by minority groups in London that only yesterday the newspaper for the gay community, the Pink Paper, warned gays and lesbians to be alert to the possibility of further nail-bomb attacks.
For three weeks British police have been on high alert amid fears of an escalating race-hate campaign. That two predominantly ethnic areas of London have been the targets of crudely made, yet vicious, nail bombs has prompted the same question among many minority groups. Who will be next? The Jewish community in north London is "on alert", according to their leaders.
And what of the fears of the city's Chinese community or Turkish people? The list is endless. Will the ethnic communities in London retreat into a ghetto culture, ever fearful of the outsider and thus giving victory to the right-wing extremists who have been so eager to claim these attacks as their own? Indeed, it appears that a determined group (or individual) is at work. Combat 18, an extreme right-wing group, claimed responsibility for the Brixton attack within days and was quickly followed by at least three other rightwing groups intent on taking ownership of the fear and pain that is gripping the ethnic minorities. Yet the members of Combat 18 - it takes its name from the letters of the alphabet which correspond with Hitler's initials - are so closely monitored by the police that many believe they could not have been responsible for the Brixton or Brick Lane attacks.
Enter another extremist rightwing group, the White Wolves. Most people had never heard of them three weeks ago, yet after Brixton a shadowy picture has emerged of a neo-Nazi hard core, "fundamentalists so disillusioned with the more established far-right parties that they are willing not just to kill," according to the Guardian.
A week before the Brixton attack this group faxed a statement to news agencies that had all the hallmarks of the terrible fascist legacy of the 1930s. Headlined the "Command Council of White Wolves" it went on: "Notice is hereby given that all non-whites and Jews (defined by blood not religion), must permanently leave the British Isles before the year is out. Jews and non-whites who remain after 1999 has ended will be exterminated. Hail Britannia.["]
This kind of twisted, racist language is, publicly at least, deeply unpopular with the British National Party, once the political home to extremist, white, rightwing young men.
One theory is that as the BNP embraces mainstream politics - in recent years it succeeded in electing one of its members to an inner London council - these violent men have turned to ever more violent means to send the message to the ethnic communities that they are not wanted.
So it may be of little surprise that police intelligence has linked these right-wing groups to loyalist terrorists in Northern Ireland. It has been a deeply disturbing week. As bombs continue to rain down on the Balkans and ethnic Albanians speak of the despicable crimes perpetrated against them, there has been murder on a doorstep in London and now, on a beautiful Friday evening, an explosion has stunned the heart of the city.