The heightened threat of suicide bombings on Friday forced British embassies around the world to re-evaluate their defences against what an al-Qaeda statement described as its ”cars of death”.
The explicit warning of fresh ”martyrdom operations” was published as police in Istanbul detained seven suspects in connection with Thursday’s devastating blasts at the British consulate and the HSBC bank.
All are understood to be Turkish passport holders.
Two of them, tentatively identified by the Turkish media as Azad Ekinci and Feridun Ugurlu, were close friends of Mesut Cabuk and Gokhan Elaltuntas, the men who carried out the suicide bombings of two synagogues in Istanbul last Saturday.
Ekinci, who fought in Chechnya and Bosnia, and Ugurlu, who trained in camps in Pakistan, reportedly hired the cars used in the synagogue attacks.
All four came from Bingol in south-eastern Turkey and had connections to an Islamist paramilitary group renowned for killing liberal opponents.
Lessons about where barriers should be placed in future will now be studied by the security officers in every mission around the world. The device, which levelled two buildings in the Istanbul consulate, is understood to have contained at least 225kg of explosives.
Because of constricted road space near the consulate, a protective concrete block had been placed inside the main gates, close to the consulate offices.
A Foreign Office spokesperson said: ”We have instructed all departments, particularly those in the region, to review security practices … Balancing the operational requirements [of the diplomatic mission] against risks is very difficult.”
In Tehran meanwhile, the vulnerability of the embassy there was again underscored when a fire bomb was thrown at the back gate of the large walled compound. No one was hurt in what was the fifth attack in four months.
A Whitehall source warned that because al-Qaeda had struck British interests abroad rather than at home did not imply the United Kingdom was safe.
The intelligence services and Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist branch have advised that an al-Qaeda atrocity in the UK is a matter of when, not if.
”We share that sentiment,” said the source. ”We can do our very best, but it is difficult. We must be prepared for it.”
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who inspected the ruined HSBC building on Friday and met the widow and elder daughter of Roger Short, the murdered British consul general, said the bombings were evidence of a ”global threat” to the civilised world.
”We who represent the civilised world are facing a global threat, and we have to deal with it in a global way.”
One leading Turkish commentator on Friday night said he believed al-Qaeda had targeted Istanbul because it was the ultimate ”symbolic city” that bridged the East and West, Islam and Christendom.
”The attacks send a message to the Islamic world that those countries which reform and acquire democratic values, like Turkey, will be a target of Islamic radicalism,” Hussein Bagdi, a security expert at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, said.
A group close to the heart of al-Qaeda on Friday claimed to have assassinated Short. The Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades posted a statement on its website saying it targeted him because he was the ”mastermind of the British policy in Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran because of his extensive experience in … combating Islam”.
In what amounted to a highly unusual apology to Muslim victims, the statement — outlining Operation Islamic Iron Hammer, a sarcastic reference to the United States military clampdown on guerrillas in Iraq — said: ”We admit that the cars of death that targeted the British bank were put in an inappropriate place, which caused some casualties among innocents.” But it promised further ”cars of death”.
A London-based Arab magazine said on Friday that al-Qaeda had vowed to carry out a major attack by February, and to strike in ”the heart of Tokyo” if Japan sent troops to Iraq.
The weekly al-Majalla said it had received an e-mail from a little known al-Qaeda member, Abu Mohammed al-Ablaj, in which he said the group planned a ”big operation” before early February. The authenticity of the email could not be verified. — Guardian Unlimited Â