Islamic militants have conducted dry runs of a devastating new style of bombing on aircraft flying to Europe, intelligence sources believe.
The tactics, which aim to evade aviation security systems by placing only components of explosive devices on passenger jets, allowing militants to assemble them in the air, have been tried out on planes flying between the Middle East, North Africa and Western Europe, security sources say.
Concerns that militants might assemble a bomb or another weapon on board were a key factor in the series of recent cancellations of transatlantic flights. Last weekend British Airways stopped flights from London to Washington and Miami for fear of an attack and Air France also cancelled scheduled flights.
Security agencies are now hunting scores of militants who have been trained in the new tactics. The warning, passed to Western agencies by Middle Eastern intelligence services, is based on interrogations of Islamic militants captured in the Arabian Gulf and is corroborated by intercepted communications between terrorist cells and interviews with prisoners held by the United States government at Guantanamo Bay.
Officials in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere are believed to have warned that at least 12 dry runs may have been completed and to have said that the terrorists are aiming to try out their plans on flights around the Mediterranean and the Middle East before attempting to bomb a transatlantic route, where security precautions are now very tight. Militants know that individual components are far easier to smuggle through airport security than an assembled bomb.
In May 2002 nearly 100g of pentrite, a plastic explosive used by the alleged shoe bomber Richard Reid, was found hidden in the armrest of a Moroccan jet when it landed in Metz, France. At the time, investigators said they thought it had been put there as a warning. Now French officials suspect the explosives were placed on the jet as a trial of the new tactics. Though some investigators fear they may be the victim of deliberate ”disinformation”, officials say that they cannot risk ignoring the warnings.
Ali Abd Rahman al-Ghamdi, alleged to be one of the masterminds of a suicide attack that killed 35 in Riyadh last May, is thought to have revealed the new tactics after giving himself up to Saudi authorities weeks after the blast. Shortly after the capture of al-Ghamdi, who is believed to be close to senior al-Qaeda figures, the US government’s Transportation Security Administration issued an urgent memo detailing new threats to aviation and warning that terrorists in teams of five might be planning suicide missions to hijack commercial airliners, possibly using common items carried by travellers, such as cameras, modified as weapons.
The CIA said that a high level of threat was based on information from several incarcerated high-ranking militants.
An FBI bulletin last November was more specific. It warned that ”terrorists are considering the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) assembled on board to hijack an aircraft or, alternatively, destroy it over heavily populated areas in the event of passenger or crew resistance.
”Components of IEDs can be smuggled on to an aircraft, concealed in either clothing or personal carry-on items such as shampoo and medicine bottles, and assembled on board.
”In many cases of suspicious passenger activity, incidents have taken place in the aircraft’s forward lavatory.”
Analysts say that although the threat of a ”spectacular” attack on the West still exists, most strikes by Islamic militants will be on soft targets in areas where security is lax. Last weekend suicide bombers killed 109 people and wounded hundreds more in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. A radical Islamic group has published claims of responsibility for a string of attacks in Iraq on a website run from the United Kingdom.
The Islamic Observation Centre (IOC), run from London by the Egyptian dissident Yasser al-Sirri, posted a statement, from ”the Ansar al-Sunnah Army” on its site last week, saying that the group was behind the Mosul attack.
The Ansar al-Sunnah Army is linked to the Ansar ul-Islam organisation, which is believed to have launched a series of bomb attacks in Iraq in recent months, killing scores of Iraqis, aid workers and coalition personnel. On Saturday senior US officers said they were tracking the group.
‘We are certainly going to follow up on the claims of responsibility,’ said Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the US command in Iraq’s deputy chief of operations. Many of the strikes have targeted local Iraqis who have cooperated with the US-led coalition authorities.
Two versions of the claim have been posted by the IOC. One threatens further attacks on ”collaborators”.
”While claiming responsibility for this heroic operation, we tell every agent who has put himself at the service of the occupier that the fate waiting for you will be much worse if you do not repent,” the statement said. The group say that the claims of hundreds of civilian casualties in the strikes are ”lies”.
A second statement, signed by the ”emir” of the group, Abu Abdullah al-Hassan bin Mahmud, calls the attacks a ”heroic deed against … the people of Kurdistan who opened their arms for the Americans and their army”. — Guardian Unlimited Â