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LONDON — London was gripped by a terrorist threat Friday when the police found two Mercedes sedans packed with gasoline, nails and gas canisters parked near Piccadilly Circus in the bustling West End entertainment district. The police defused both bombs, but had they exploded “there could have been significant injury or loss of life,” Peter Clarke, Britain’s senior counterterrorism police officer, told reporters. Hours later, Clarke told another news conference at New Scotland Yard that the second car, illegally parked in Cockspur Street a few hundred yards from the first in Haymarket, had been rigged like the first, adding, “The vehicles are clearly linked.” Security experts said neither the bomb materials nor the cell phone triggering device was particularly sophisticated. Nor, said Sajjan M. Gohel, a counterterrorism expert with the Asia-Pacific Foundation, did the attack “seem to be very well-planned.” But the idea of a multiple attack using car bombs — a departure from the backpack suicide attacks of the London bombings of July 2005 — raised concerns among security experts that jihadist groups linked to al-Qaida may have imported tactics more familiar in Iraq. Both bombs seem to have been discovered by accident. In the first case, an ambulance crew alerted the police after seeing what it thought was smoke inside a silver-green Mercedes parked outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in Haymarket. The police defused an explosive device there by hand in the small hours, but they did not reveal the episode until early Friday. Then, after a day of growing tensions and reports of a second bomb, the police confirmed Friday night that they had found a blue Mercedes rigged to explode in a car pound on up-market Park Lane, where it was stowed after being ticketed and towed away. Traffic agents said they had smelled gasoline fumes coming from the vehicle. The car was towed about 3:30 a.m., roughly two and a half hours after the discovery of the first vehicle, the police said. If the cars were supposed to explode in spectacular fashion, the plot had clearly gone awry. ABC News reported that British security officials said they had seen a “crystal-clear” image on a security tape of the driver jumping from the green Mercedes, and that he bore “a close resemblance” to a man arrested in an earlier bomb plot but released for lack of evidence. A British security official confirmed in an interview Friday that authorities were concerned the attacker might have been a person already known to them who had slipped out of sight after “crossing the radar” in a separate conspiracy. In recent weeks, several terrorism suspects supposed to be restricted in their movements by control orders have disappeared, but they are more likely to have fled abroad, the official said. The attempted bombings, as well as the potential for further violence, posed an immediate challenge to the new prime minister, Gordon Brown, who convened a meeting of Britain’s top security committee — called Cobra, for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A — to assess the severity of the situation. In the course of a jittery day in London, police barred people and vehicles from Park Lane and urged others to leave adjoining Hyde Park because officers had suspicions, later confirmed, about the car in the underground parking lot. Fleet Street, leading from central London to the traditional financial district to the east, was also cordoned off, but later reopened. The closures left tracts of central London in gridlock on a busy Friday afternoon when streets are normally packed. Some Londoners seemed unfazed by the news of the botched attacks. “It’s something you get used to, living in London,” said Andrew Fowler, a 39-year-old lawyer sipping coffee at an outdoor cafe near Piccadilly. “And given the stance our government made on the war in Iraq and elsewhere, I think we are just getting used to being a target.” The alert, which closed off streets around Haymarket, brought some people out of nearby offices to find out what was going on. “It’s only when I got to work that I realized what was happening,” said Renee Anderson, 32, a New Zealander from her country’s nearby diplomatic mission. “I feel surprisingly all right about it. We all kind of thought, ‘Well, you could be hit by a bus anyway.’ “ News of the developments broke over Britain’s breakfast tables when a police spokesman said explosives experts had discovered a “potentially viable explosive device” in a vehicle. British news organizations quoted witnesses as saying police officers had been seen removing what appeared to be propane gas cylinders and a large number of nails from the car. Sky News quoted an eyewitness who said the car had been driven erratically before it collided with garbage bins, and that the driver had run off. Clarke, the counterterrorism officer, could not confirm that version of events. The Tiger Tiger nightclub was packed with hundreds of people at the time the first bomb was discovered. One woman at the club, Rajeshree Patel, told the BBC that the Mercedes had all its doors open and its headlights on. “I think there would have been a lot of fatalities” if the car had exploded, she said. “There were approximately 500 people inside Tiger Tiger at the time.” 160Want local news?Sign up for the Localist and stay informed Something went wrong. Please try again.subscribeCongratulations! You’re all set! read more