[1] It was the IRA's second major attack in London in February 1991 after the Downing Street mortar attack eleven days earlier which was an attempt to assassinate the British War cabinet and the British prime minister John Major.

[3] The IRA had stepped up their campaign against British military, economic and transport targets outside of Northern Ireland in the late 1980s.

On 20 July 1990 the IRA detonated a large bomb at the London Stock Exchange causing massive damage but no injuries.

[4] On 26 February 1884, at Victoria station, an explosion occurred in the cloakroom of the Brighton side injuring seven staff members, as part of the Fenian dynamite campaign.

[6] On 8 September 1973, an IRA bomb exploded at the ticket office in Victoria station, injuring five people.

[8] Despite a 45-minute warning and the Paddington bomb three hours before, which was much smaller than that at Victoria, the security services were slow to act.

A statement from the IRA GHQ said: "The cynical decision of senior security personnel not to evacuate railway stations named in secondary warnings, even three hours after the warning device had exploded at Paddington in the early hours of this morning was directly responsible for the casualties at Victoria."

Commander George Churchill-Coleman, head of Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist squad, said that dozens of hoax calls were received every day.