This time, though, it looks like it wasn’t nearly as serious.

Three London Underground stations were evacuated at midday Thursday, and the London police commissioner confirmed that four explosions occurred in the subway and on a bus. The Fire Brigade was investigating a report of smoke at one station.

Emergency services personnel were also responding to some sort of incident on a bus in the Hackney neighborhood.
[...]
Some witnesses said they heard gunshots at the Warren Street stop but according to Sky News, police believe those noises were actually detonators going off for bombs that didn’t explode

While there are obvious superficial similarities, the apparent, consistent failure of the bombs to do as much damage as the 7/7 attacks raises a question: copycat? Is this a case of some unaffiliated group that took the last attack as inspiration in launching their own coordinated assault? That the explosives failed--again, consistently--speaks of a less skilled bomb maker.

Of course, if that speculation is wrong, and this was the work of the same organization, then the footage and the remainders of the unexploded devices could provide a wealth of knowledge as well as living “martyrs” to track down.

Either this was a failed copycat attempt or, potentially, a huge miscalculation on the part of a terrorist organization. (A toast to their failures!)

Either way, London must be feeling a bit twitchy this morning; attacks using similar tactics coming two weeks after the original attacks must leave people feeling a bit underprotected.

Read the story.

Quick Update: Now, having read down all the way to the bottom of the article I had just linked, I note this as the very last paragraph:

The concern among U.S. officials in these situations is whether there would be legitimate follow-up attacks by the same group responsible for the July 7 bombings, or “copy cat” incidents, of lesser severity and effectiveness.

Second Update: The sense that this isn’t the same group seems to be shared by quite a few people. For example, read this that I found through Michelle Malkin’s roundup of reactions.

Further Updates: I do hope that the people captured will provide useful information. And Europhobia has a collection of good links on the story.