British Police Denounce IRA Claim That Ample Bomb Alert Was Given : Terrorism: Authorities deny any responsibility for bloodshed. The attack indicates targets may have shifted to tourism and civilian sites.

The British police responded angrily Tuesday to charges by the Irish Republican Army that ample warning was given in advance of the bomb blast that killed one person and injured 43 at Victoria Station on Monday.

In commenting on IRA charges that the police should have cleared the station after a 40-minute warning, a Scotland Yard spokesman declared:

“For the terrorists to blame the police for their own outrages is particularly galling and almost beggars belief. Those responsible for the deaths and injuries were those who planted the bombs.”

The earlier IRA statement had 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 (Station) in the early hours of the morning was directly responsible for the casualties at Victoria. All future warnings should be acted upon.”

Prime Minister John Major told Parliament Tuesday that the bombers would be “hunted and hunted” until they were found.

The explosions among civilians in commuter railroad stations apparently mark another shift in IRA strategy against Great Britain, authorities said Tuesday.

Seemingly abandoning the most recent strategy of attacking military and government targets to underscore its opposition to British rule of Northern Ireland, the IRA has focused on upsetting the pace of life in London and damaging British tourism.

Tourism, already hard hit by the threat of Iraqi terrorism and the trans-Atlantic recession, is expected to suffer further this spring and summer if Americans fear they might be victims of IRA bombs.

Now any phone call warning of a bomb may lead to a railroad station or central city thoroughfare being shut down and vacated.

While the IRA has routinely set off bombs that have killed and maimed in Ulster, targets on the British mainland provide the IRA with higher media attention and widespread publicity for their activities.

Such acts, authorities say, apparently give the relatively small number of IRA activists more satisfaction than blowing up a police patrol or bombing a pub in Northern Ireland.

As an IRA source told the Republican News in Belfast last week, “Any action in Britain has many times the effect of a similar action in the Six Counties (Ulster). Our intention is always to keep the enemy guessing.”

Some observers believe that if the IRA steps up its terrorist activity, Londoners will have to become as inured to weekly or daily disruption as the citizens of Belfast.

Twelve days ago, the IRA launched a makeshift mortar barrage against the prime minister’s office-residence at No. 10 Downing Street, coming within a few dozen feet of hitting a room where Major was holding a War Cabinet meeting.

Britain has several intelligence and police services tracking down IRA terrorists--with limited success, partly, some critics suggest, because those services are sometimes competitive and uncooperative with one another.

The intelligence services include the Special Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland; British military intelligence in Ulster, including undercover soldiers of the Special Air Service; and in Britain, the Special Branch of the police force; MI-5, the Secret Security Service; MI-6, the Secret Intelligence Service, which attempts to trace IRA activity in the Republic of Ireland and other European countries; telephone intercepts from the Government Communications Headquarters; and activities of the Anti-Terrorist Squad in London.

“What is missing is high-caliber intelligence about the inside of the IRA organization and the way it operates on the mainland,” observed Prof. Paul Wilkinson, head of the Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism at St. Andrews University.

“We are still reacting to their attacks rather than really getting ahead of events.”