An alleged plot to blow up United States-bound aircraft from Britain bears all the hallmarks of al-Qaeda and may have been inspired by a similar conspiracy a decade ago, officials and analysts said on Thursday.
Robert Mueller, head of the US FBI, said the reported plan, which British authorities said they had thwarted, had ”the earmarks of an al-Qaeda plot”.
That view was supported by US Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff who said the operation — allegedly to down multiple US-bound airliners over the Atlantic Ocean — was ”in some respects suggestive” of the organisation headed by Osama bin Laden.
Bob Ayers, from the London-based foreign affairs think tank Chatham House, agreed it had the modus operandi of earlier al-Qaeda attacks, particularly for choosing ”soft”, symbolic targets.
”If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck and looks like a duck, then the chances are it is a duck,” the terrorism and security specialist said when asked about potential links to al-Qaeda.
”Multiple targets, excellent planning and coordination, lots of preparation, it’s been well-funded … if that’s not al-Qaeda, then God save us if there’s another one out there.”
Paul Wilkinson, from the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland, said it was ”a very ambitious plot indeed”.
”It is the kind of spectacular, potentially lethal attack which the al-Qaeda network has been particularly interested in carrying out,” he added. ”I would be very surprised if it was found that they were not involved as a movement.
”It is possible, I suppose, that some other movement could have copied the kind of techniques that had been used by the al-Qaeda network, but I think that’s unlikely.”
British Home Secretary John Reid was tight-lipped when asked if the alleged conspiracy could have been inspired by a foiled plot to blow up 12 US-bound passenger jets over the Pacific Ocean in 1995.
But Chertoff said it had echoes of that plot, called ”Operation Bojinka”, planned by Ramzi Yousef and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Yousef was jailed for 240 years in November 1997 for his part in the World Trade Centre bombings in New York four years earlier in which six people died and more than 1 000 were injured.
He was also convicted of planting a ”micro-bomb”, smuggled on to Philippines Airlines flight 434 and assembled in a toilet, that killed a Japanese businessman. That attack, in December 1994, was supposedly a trial run for the larger ”Bojinka” operation.
Mohammed, the self-proclaimed head of al-Qaeda’s military committee, was arrested in Pakistan in 2003 and is said to have been a mastermind behind the September 11 2001 attacks on the US.
Of the comparisons with ”Bojinka”, Reid would only say that ”we are aware of the history books of things that have been tried in the past”.
Ayers said Yousef’s plot, foiled after plans were discovered in his Manila apartment bolt-hole, could have provided the idea but that equally planes were used to devastating effect in the September 2001 attacks.
Wilkinson said Yousef — who proclaimed he was proud to be a ”terrorist” at his trial — was known to have developed techniques for liquid-based devices that could be smuggled on board without detection and assembled quickly.
The Philippines Airlines bomb used a conventional digital watch as a timer, stabilisers that looked like cotton-wool balls and nine-volt batteries as a power supply. The nitroglycerin-based explosive was taken on board in a contact-lens case.
Nevertheless John Potter, a security psychologist who helps train hostage negotiators, saw another aim in the alleged plot, which came at the height of the British summer holiday getaway.
”Disruption is key. They will see the disruption as a victory,” said Potter, a former senior lecturer in military technology and psychology at Britain’s elite Sandhurst military training college. — AFP
