Terrorists are sizing up the City of London, Europe’s premier financial centre, and an attack on the teeming district is only a matter of time, its chief of police warned on Wednesday.
James Hart faulted big corporations based in the so-called ”square mile” — which includes the offices of major United States, European and Japanese financial institutions — of failing to take the threat seriously.
”Every successful terrorist group pre-surveys its target,” Hart, Commissioner of the City of London police, told the Financial Times newspaper in a front-page interview.
”There’s no doubt we’ve been subjected to that surveillance,” he said, adding that ”that sort of thing has been successfully disrupted”.
Potential targets staked out have included iconic sites, business and prominent buildings — ”anywhere where the maximum damage can be inflicted on the financial systems of the City of London”.
”If you want to hurt the government, hurt people at the same time, and you want to cause maximum disruption … what better to hit than at the financial centre?” he said.
Yet, he said, despite the July 7 attacks on three underground trains and a double-decker bus that killed 56 people, including four apparent suicide bombers, only half of businesses in the city have contingency plans in place.
”All big businesses are well aware of their vulnerabilities in terms of the need for business planning,” Hart said. ”How much that planning translates into operational effect, I sometimes wonder.”
The City of London, in the very heart of the capital, maintains its own police force that works closely with the metropolitan police, which covers greater London and doubles as Britain’s lead anti-terrorist force.
As a financial district, the city is without peer in Europe, and ranks alongside New York and Tokyo in global significance. Its iconic sites include St Paul’s Cathedral, one of London’s top tourist attractions.
It is no stranger to terrorism. In the 1990s, it was targeted by the Irish Republican Army, which notably set off a truck bomb in Bishopsgate in April 1993 that killed one person, injured 40 and caused massive damage.
The July 7 attacks — linked by the British government to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network — touched the city as well: one of the bombed subway trains was near Aldgate station, on its eastern edge.
In September 2003, the city played host to a simulated chemical attack on the underground in which hundreds of people were evacuated from Bank station, near the Bank of England and London Stock Exchange.
The police chief’s comments came as a debate continued to rage over how to deal with hard-line Islamists suspected of promoting terrorism among the nation’s 1,6-million Muslims.
Michael Howard, leader of the main opposition Conservatives, criticised judges for citing the Human Rights Act to undercut legislation intended to combat terrorism and extremism.
The act was introduced by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government in 1998, a year after his Labour Party won power from the Conservatives.
”Parliament must be supreme,” wrote Howard in the Daily Telegraph newspaper. ”Aggressive judicial activism will not only undermine the public’s confidence in the impartiality of our judiciary, but it could also put our security at risk — and with it the freedoms the judges seek to defend.”
In a related development, Saudi Arabia’s outgoing ambassador to Britain, Prince Turki al-Faisal, complained how he was left ”going round in circles” as he tried to warn British officials about Saudi dissidents in Britain.
”When you call somebody [in the government], he says it is the other guy [who deals with the issue],” he told the Times newspaper. ”We have been in this runaround for the last two-and-a-half years.”
Turki’s grievances centred on two dissidents — Saad Faqih, accused by the US in the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, and Mohammad al-Masari, who runs a jihadi website from his north London home.
Another former Saudi dissident is Omar Bakri Mohammed, a Syrian-born imam notorious for his hard-line Islamist views. He left for Lebanon at the weekend, and there is growing speculation that the government might ban his return.
Bakri was quoted in the Evening Standard newspaper on Wednesday as saying he expects to undergo a heart operation in November or December in London, paid for by Britain’s free-care-for-all National Health Service.
The pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat quoted him on Wednesday as saying that he arrived on Tuesday in the Gulf emirate of Sharjah after spending three days in Beirut. Officials could not confirm the report. — Sapa-AFP