Liverpool bomb would have caused serious injury or death: police

The homemade bomb in the foiled attack in Liverpool had ball-bearings attached and would have caused “significant injury or death” if properly detonated, UK police said Friday.

Iraq-born Emad Al Swealmeen’s improvised device went off in the back of a taxi outside a hospital, just moments before Remembrance Sunday events that honour military war dead.

Swealmeen, 32, was killed in the fireball, while the quick-thinking taxi driver escaped with minor injuries after reportedly locking Swealmeen inside his cab.

Police have spoken to Swealmeen’s brother “and this has given us an insight into his early years… and his recent state of mind,” said Russ Jackson, who heads counter-terrorism policing in northwest England.

“Although there is much scientific work to do on the device to determine what made it up, we have learned a great deal over the past five days,” he said in a statement.

“It was made using homemade explosive and had ball-bearings attached to it which would have acted as shrapnel. Had it detonated in different circumstances we believe it would have caused significant injury or death.”

Police are trying to understand why the device exploded when it did and “are not discounting it being completely unintentional.

“It is a possibility that the movement of the vehicle or its stopping caused the ignition,” said Jackson.

The botched blast was the second attack in Britain in the last month, after a British MP was stabbed to death as he met constituents in southeast England in October.

The two attacks prompted the government on Monday to raise the terror threat level from “substantial” to “severe” — the second-highest — meaning an attack was “highly likely”.

Swealmeen planned the blast for at least seven months, police said Wednesday, using “many aliases” to purchase the ingredients for the bomb.