The bomber struck shortly after noon in front of a rally in Liverpool, northern England, on Friday, police said.
A car bomb had exploded at an Iraqi police recruiting center at Kisak, west of Baghdad, killing at least 32 people.
Ras Jackson, head of the area’s counterterrorism service, said today that the bomb had been made using “improvised explosive devices and had bearings attached to it that could act as fragments”.
“If it had been fired under different circumstances, we believe it would have caused significant injuries or death,” he said in a statement.
Jackson clarified that the explosive device was different from the one that was used during the attack on a concert hall in Manchester in 2017.
“We still do not know how or why the device exploded when it exploded, but we do not rule out that it did not happen intentionally, and it is possible that the movement or stopping of the vehicle caused the ignition,” he said.
