One eyewitness described hearing a large sound, seeing great clouds of smoke and a scene "like a war zone". Five people were injured and many of the shops and restaurants that line the narrow Brick Lane, or Bangla Town as it is now known, were badly damaged in the blast which occurred just before 6 PM on Saturday.

Kories Chowdhry who runs a shop on the street said: "If it had happened just 15 minutes later there would have been a disaster because all the restaurants were just getting ready to open."

The Brick Lane bomb came exactly one week after a similar bomb attack in Brixton in south London, in which 39 people were injured. Brixton has a large Afro-Caribbean population. The blast also came on the 20th anniversaryof the death of Anti-Nazi League campaigner Blair Peach, who led a successful drive to close down the extreme right-wing racist National Front office in the area.

Combat 18, neo-Nazi white supremacist terrorist organisation has claimed responsibility for both blasts. The group's name is based on Adolf Hitler's initials the first and eighth letters in the alphabet. Its membership is said to be between 40 and 200. It is said to have convicted bombers as among its members. But anti-racist activists say that Combat 18 is infiltrated by police, army and anti-racism activists forcing it to be dormant. They fear that the bombs are the work of a small group of renegades, "frustrated by lack of action" and intent on fomenting a race war.

The police have said that they are treating the attack as racist and are linking it to the Brixton blast, but do not know yet who was responsible. London's police force is under tremendous pressure to protect London's ethnic minorities, following a government inquiry into theirhandling of the racist murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence which came to the unequivocal conclusion that the police was institutionally racist.

Black community leaders say there has been increased tension in ethnic minority areas across London since the Stephen Lawrence inquiry report was published. Lee Jasper, of the National Assembly Against Racism says, "The moment the Brixton bombing took place we said that the only conceivable motive was racism. The Brick Lane bomb now makes this irrefutable."

Following the Brixton bomb Police warned Black, Asian and Jewish members of the House of Lords that they may receive racist threat letters. Underlining the gravity of the situation, Prime Minister Tony Blair, in Washington for the NATO anniversary meeting, said: "These things are outrageous, and we will not tolerate them. We will make every effort to find out those responsible and bring them to justice." But the question being asked in black and Asian communities across London today is, why after Brixtonwere the police not one step ahead of the bombers?