A POLICE officer has said he did not evacuate the Isle of Dogs following a bomb warning because the IRA's tactic of being non specific "made it almost impossible for us to get it right".
The assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in northeast London, Mr Anderson Dunn, was defending his role in the operation.
Mr Dunn said officers were dispatched from Limehouse police station to search for a vehicle or package which might contain the bomb. But they were hampered by the unspecific nature of the telephone warnings.
Mr Dunn said "Had we known exactly where this device was and when it was going to blow up, it would have been a more simple matter to organise a full evacuation.
The first telephone warning, sent to Scotland Yard at 5.41 p.m. by RTE radio, gave the location as South Quay station on the Isle of Dogs. British Transport Police officers were immediately sent to the area to evacuate the station and warn those in the surrounding office blocks to remain inside.
A Scotland Yard spokeswoman confirmed that when the first telephone warning was received, Mr Dunn sent four officers to close the station and turn commuters away. Three more telephone warnings relayed from Dublin and Belfast in the next 18 minutes, described as "vague" by Scotland Yard, made the task of finding the device "extremely difficult".
By 6.15 pm, 36 minutes after the first warning, 20 police officers were in the area and the Docklands Light Railway had been closed. Police were removing many of the vehicles outside the station.
Critically, office blocks and pubs on the Isle of Dogs were not completely cleared and this, said Scotland Yard, was because the bomb had not been located. For the next 45 minutes, police worked to clear the streets around South Quay station and divert pedestrians and traffic.
One eye witness caught up in the confusion of the evacuation indicated, however, that in the critical 90 minutes between the first telephone warning and the detonation of the bomb, the reaction of the police was "less than urgent".
At 6.57 p.m., four minutes before the explosion, Mr Zafar Sharif left his office in Beaufort Court on the Isle of Dogs. He was prevented from leaving the area by a police officer, who told him there was a bomb scare. But, Mr Sharif said "He didn't tell me I should get out of the area quickly, there wasn't any urgency in his voice."
One local resident said she felt the emphasis of the police operation, while rightly focusing on the area where the bomb exploded, had failed "in some respects to safeguard everyone in the community".
The final stage of the police operation came at 6.59 p.m., when Police Constable Roger de Graaf located a flat backed blue lorry parked outside South Quay Plaza. After checking the registration number and its position beside South Quay station, he decided it did contain a bomb and set about evacuating office blocks. At 7.01 p.m. the lorry bomb exploded, killing two young men and causing damage costing up to £100 million.