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| Britain |
| Metro chief warns of further terrorist attacks |
| 2006-04-18 |
| Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, is expected to warn in the US that Britain faces further terrorist attacks, which although influenced from abroad could be carried out by a new generation of home-grown mass assassins. The threat to the west from global terrorism and the links forged by law enforcement and intelligence agencies to try to deal with it will be the broad theme of his lecture today to the Citizens' Crime Commission of New York City. A previous lecture to the same organisation by Robert S Mueller, chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, after the September 11 2001 attacks boasted how the US had "taken the fight to al-Qaeda" and "taken into custody more than 3,000 al-Qaeda leaders and foot soldiers worldwide". But Sir Ian's speech, nine months on from the July 7 London bombings, is likely to present a more sober assessment of the so-called war on terror amid emerging threats and evidence of a lack of political consensus for dealing with them. According to a government report due to be published after Easter, the July 7 bombings, which killed 52 people, were planned and executed by four British-born extremists who lived and worked in Muslim communities. Police and security agencies have not uncovered evidence of a wider international operational link to the plot, although the bombers were inspired by al-Qaeda's distorted interpretation of Islam and justification for human slaughter. Two theories initially surrounding the plot - that the bombers were linked to terrorists in Pakistan and may have had help from an Egyptian-born chemist in making their bombs - have been discounted. Two of the bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan, the Leeds-born primary school teacher now believed to be the leader of the July 7 bombers, and Shahzad Tanweer were discovered to have travelled to Pakistan between November 2004 and February last year. This raised questions over the role that may have been played by madrassah Islamic schools in providing know-how in the manufacture and use of explosives later used in the attack. Senior intelligence officials in Islamabad said this week they had yet to find any links to the London bombings and their British counterparts have also failed to come up with any firm intelligence pointing to such a connection. What UK investigators now believe is that Khan was radicalised before his trip to Pakistan, although along with Tanweer his beliefs might have been reinforced by the journey. Such findings have not dispelled questions about the extent to which shortcomings in intelligence may have undermined the UK's national security after it emerged that MI5, the Security Service, and police called off a surveillance operation on Khan during an investigation into a separate suspected terrorist plot more than a year before the attacks on London's transport system. UK police and intelligence sources say that while numerous suspect extremists are under surveillance, there remains a worrying intelligence gap about individuals who may be considering acts of terrorism but on whom there is no information due to the lack of a developed secret agent structure within the Muslim community. Pakistan says it has banned foreign nationals from attending madrassah schools without permission from the government - a move Pakistani officials say is helping stem the tide of foreign nationals venturing into a network that western intelligence officials believe remains central to promoting militancy. A government strategy in recent months has been based on greater engagement with the Muslim community. Even that, say representatives of the Muslim community, might end up understating the extent to which the foreign policy being pursued by the UK's alliance with the US, particularly in Iraq, might have contributed to radicalising the July bombers. Imayat Bunglawala, secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: "The problem for the governmentis that it cannot admit that its own foreign policy may have contributed to undermining national security, which is why we want a public inquiry into July 7." |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |