LONDON (Reuters):

Police found two car bombs packed with petrol, gas and nails inLondon's teeming theatre district yesterday, averting attacks that echoed an earlier al-Qaida plot and which could have killed or maimed scores of people.

Officers defused the first bomb, found in a green Mercedes parked outside one of London's biggest nightclubs, the cavernous Tiger Tiger, around 1:00 a.m. (midnight GMT), when hundreds were packed inside for'"Sugar 'n' Spice Ladies Night'.

The police, alerted by ambulance workers who thought they saw smoke inside the car, defused the first bomb at the scene, saying it contained gas tanks, fuel cannisters and nails.

Similar materials were later found in a blue Mercedes that had been parked illegally nearby and towed away. The two cars were "clearly linked," said Peter Clarke, London's anti-terrorism police chief. "The discovery of what appears to be a second bomb is obviously troubling and reinforces the need for the public to be alert." Authorities said they did not know who left the bombs but they had begun a counter-terrorism investigation.