London blasts throw G8 summit into crisis

GLENEAGLES, Scotland - A series of apparent bomb attacks in London threw the Group of Eight summit into crisis on Thursday, forcing Britain's Tony Blair to leave the venue in Scotland to handle the emergency.

Blair, backed by all the leaders of the G8 industrialised nations and guest countries including China and India, vowed the summit would continue regardless and said he would return to the gathering at the Gleneagles hotel in the evening.

"It is particularly barbaric that this has happened on a day when people are meeting to try to help the problems of poverty in Africa, the long-term problems of climate change and the environment," the prime minister said.

Blair said the blasts -- on a number of buses and underground trains -- had probably been timed to coincide with the first full day of the summit, which he had intended as a landmark event to address global warming and African poverty.

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was rushing to Scotland to chair the meeting in Blair's absence, officials said. Environmental groups said they believed plans to issue a statement on climate change would be postponed for the day.

"Just as it is reasonably clear that this is a terrorist attack -- or a series of terrorist attacks -- it's also reasonably clear that this is designed, aimed, to coincide with the opening of the G8," Blair said.

The British prime minister later read out a joint statement on behalf of all the world leaders assembled in Scotland.

"We are united in our resolve to confront and defeat this terrorism," he said, flanked by all the G8 leaders.

The explosions came the day after London won the right to stage the 2012 Olympic Games, a victory widely seen as one of the high points of Blair's premiership.

London has long been identified as a prime target for Islamic militants, partly because of Blair's staunch support for US President George W Bush and the Iraq war.

The blasts completely overshadowed Thursday's main topic at the summit -- efforts to tackle global warming.

The leaders had been trying to finalise an agreement that could bring together the United States, other rich nations and major developing economies such as China and India.

Any deal is unlikely to satisfy environmentalists, who want all countries to sign up to binding targets on the carbon emissions that scientists say are causing the world to heat up.

Blair said he wanted to move beyond the binding Kyoto protocol, which the United States has refused to accept.

"There is no point going back over the Kyoto debate ... that's not what it's about," he said after talks with Bush earlier in the day.

"What it is about is seeing whether it will be possible in the future to bring people back into consensus together, not just America and Europe and Japan but also ... the emerging economies like China, like India," he said.

The US has refused to accept any targets that could damage its economy and says there is no point in agreements that exclude big growing economies such as China and India.

Bush urged the world to focus instead on developing new clean technologies.

- REUTERS