Photos of DHL fire suggest blast was strong enough to down plane

Photographs of the fire caused by a suspected Russian incendiary device at a DHL facility in Birmingham in July have backed up intelligence assessments that the blast was strong enough to have brought down a cargo plane.

- Dan Sabbagh

One image appears to show the moment when the booby-trapped item, hidden in a massage device, ignited. A distinctive bright flash emerges from the top of a crate of parcels being moved across the site by an electric vehicle.

A second image shows the crate a few metres away being engulfed by the blaze, the light of which is consistent with a fire caused by a magnesium-based device, on the ground just outside the warehouse in Minworth, Birmingham.

The markings on the ground in the photographs match satellite images of the DHL site, and sources familiar with the incident indicated they depicted the scene.

The incident remains under investigation by counter-terror police.

One of the pictures was first published by the Wall Street Journal last month, though the fire it depicted was not identified as having taken place in Birmingham. A similar incident occurred at a DHL site in Leipzig in late July, in a parcel that was also said to have been destined for the UK, and sent originally from Lithuania.