A Real Ira terrorist cell came within a fraction of an inch of slaughtering and maiming hundreds of innocent young people in Birmingham city centre, the Sunday Mercury can reveal. The happy-go-lucky revellers survived only because a single electrical wire from the detonator worked loose from a massive home-made car bomb. It missed making contact by just 2mm - the thickness of a 50p coin. As a result, the 100 lbs device, made out of agricultural fertiliser and packed into a red plastic barrel in the boot, failed to go off. The explosive ingredients were also poorly mixed, making the bomb a double dud. Only the detonator went off - damaging just the car and scattering white powder all over Small-brook Queensway in November 2001. But even the harmless cloud sparked hysteria in the aftermath of September 11 because of fears that it might have been anthrax. Five Real IRA terrorists were jailed for a total of 100 years at the Old Bailey last Wednesday for conspiracy to cause explosions. Anti-terrorist police believe that the commander of the active service unit - and other members of the terrorist cell - are still at large and are being ruthlessly hunted amid fears of more blasts. Last night a security source who saw the bungled bomb still inside the car in Smallbrook Queensway told the Sunday Mercury: It is just a miracle it didnt go off. One of the two wires from the detonator was not properly embedded into the bomb - but it failed to make contact only by a whisker. How or why it came loose, no one will ever know. But had the bomb gone off - with thousands of mainly young people thronging the streets of the city centre and inside pubs and clubs - there would have been total carnage. The bomb was so powerful that it would have taken out most of the top end of Small-brook Queensway. It made me shudder to realise what could have happened and to see with my own eyes just how close Birmingham came to an appalling tragedy. The security source said that the bomb was of exactly the same kind as the Real IRA device which exploded in Omagh, Northern Ireland, in August 1998, killing 29 people and injuring more than 200. The Birmingham bomb had been left in an Audi car bought earlier in the day for £500 from Junction Ten Car Sales in Walsall by a man who said he wanted a cheap vehicle which would get him to London. The car was parked less than 100 yards from the former Mulberry Bush pub sited underneath The Rotunda. Together with the former Tavern in the Town in nearby New Street, it was the target of the Birmingham pub bombings in November 1974. Twenty-one people died and more than 200 were injured in the worst-ever IRA atrocity on the British mainland. After the pub bombings, Birmingham was placed strictly off limits to IRA active service units by the Provisional IRAs General Army Council because of the anti-Irish fury that the outrage generated in the city. More than half of the dead, including two brothers, were either Irish or of Irish-descent and the angry message went back to Dublin: For Gods sake, youre killing our own! But the ultra-extreme Real IRA sneered at the truce with almost catastrophic results in Birmingham. Unlike November 21 1974, luck was on Birminghams side all round on November 3 2001. The biggest stroke of good fortune, of course, was that the car bomb did not explode. But a telephone warning which would have given enough time for the area to be evacuated was ignored - without fatal consequences as it turned out. One of the Real IRA gang rang McCluskeys, in nearby Hurst Street. After giving a codeword known to police, he said: This is a bomb threat. Its on Smallbrook Queensway, opposite Jessops. Phone the police. They will know who I am. But the message was never passed on to police because the club had received a number of hoax calls in the past. | 
