Britain on Edge After Car Slams Into Airport

Britain on Edge After Car Slams Into Airport
By ALAN COWELL and RAYMOND BONNER
Published: July 1, 2007
LONDON, June 30 — One day after uncovering what they called a double car-bomb plot in London, British officials raised the country’s terrorism threat assessment to its highest level after two men slammed a Jeep S.U.V. into entrance doors at Glasgow Airport Saturday and turned the vehicle into a potentially lethal fireball.
One of the attackers was ablaze from head to foot, and as he struggled with the police, “was throwing punches and shouting ‘Allah, Allah,’ ” a witness said on BBC television.
Britain’s threat level is now at “critical,” meaning that another attack is considered imminent. The threat has not been as high since last year, after authorities discovered an alleged plot to attack trans-Atlantic airliners with liquid explosives in August.
A British security official, who like other officials who disclosed information on Saturday insisted on anonymity, said the heightened level reflected an assessment that the London and Glasgow cases were “linked in some ways and, therefore, there are clearly individuals who have the capability and intent to carry out further attacks.”
The links related to the way the foiled car-bomb attacks in London and the airport attack in Glasgow had been conceived and planned using vehicles and gasoline, the official said.
Within an hour of the announcement, authorities said the airport in Liverpool had also been closed until further notice, apparently reflecting a fresh area of concern as an increasingly jittery nation braced for further possible episodes.
In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement from Secretary Michael Chertoff saying there were no plans to raise the national threat level because there was “no specific, credible information suggesting that this latest incident is connected to a threat to the homeland.”
Still, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said additional security measures were being taken at the region’s airports, and the New York City police were taking steps that included sending officers into parking garages with sensors that detect the presence of chemical, biological and radiological agents. A police spokesman said the department was also closely monitoring tourist areas, including nightclubs.
Although there were questions throughout the day about whether the driver of the Glasgow vehicle crashed it intentionally, by Saturday night, Sir William Rae, the chief constable of the Strathclyde area around Glasgow, called it attack was an act of terrorism.
Mr. Rae said one of the two men was found to be wearing a “suspicious device” at the hospital where he was being treated. The hospital was evacuated, the police official said, but he declined to comment on reporters’ suggestions that the assailant — said to be in critical condition — had been wearing a suicide bombers’ belt. A person with knowledge of the investigation said that the device was a suicide belt, and also that the car contained propane canisters.
Mr. Rae said the attack at the airport, Scotland’s largest, was linked to the car bombs in London, but he did not elaborate.
In July 2005, coordinated transit bombings killed four attackers and 52 others, and another set of attacks failed two weeks later, bringing home to Britain fears of homegrown terrorist attacks among its disenfranchised South Asian population. Witnesses to the Glascow attack said the two men involved were South Asian.
In office for only four days, a somber Prime Minister Gordon Brown appeared briefly on national television from 10 Downing Street late Saturday. “I want all British people to be vigilant and I want them to support the police and all the authorities in the difficult decisions that they have to make,” he said. “I know that the British people will stand together, united, resolute and strong.”
The Glasgow attack came on the first full day of the school summer vacations, when thousands of people were awaiting flights. The sight of the dark green Jeep Cherokee smashing into the building and bursting into flame spread panic and terror among people awaiting flights.
Hours after the attack, hundreds of passengers remained on stranded airplanes on the tarmac. The authorities said they could not be allowed into the terminal because of potential further dangers.
Britain on Edge After Car Slams Into Airport
Published: July 1, 2007
(Page 2 of 2)
The events in London and Scotland deepened foreboding among security experts that Britain was confronting a new threat: the use of relatively unsophisticated, homemade explosive devices to claim lives and spread mayhem.
Britain’s newest terrorist alert began in the early hours of Friday, when two Mercedes sedans filled with gasoline, gas canisters and nails were found parked in the central West End theater and nightclub district.
On Saturday in Scotland, accounts by witnesses gathered by news agencies were confused, but some spoke of the two occupants of the car smashing bottles of gasoline and struggling with police officers and others who tried to restrain them.
The man on fire may have immolated himself. The police said two men were arrested.
The events at Glasgow Airport also came as London — already worried by the discovery of the rigged cars — braced for a weekend of high-profile events, including a concert to honor the memory of Diana, Princess of Wales; a Gay Pride March; and the Wimbledon tennis tournament.
The police in the capital stepped up foot patrols as counterterrorism officers hunted suspects linked to the cars found in London.
But the attack in Scotland seemed to have taken the authorities by surprise. Mr. Rae, the Scottish police officer, said there had been no intelligence warning of an attack.
Prime Minister Brown, who is himself a Scot, summoned two emergency meetings of the high-level security committee called Cobra to try to come to grips with the attacks.
In London, counterterrorism experts suggested that the bombers who abandoned the two explosives-laden Mercedes might have been what a senior Western official called “less directed from Al Qaeda and more a matter of a homegrown group,” although the attack seemed to be modeled on terrorist attacks in Iraq.
A British official, speaking in return for anonymity, said the level of sophistication in the attacks was “at the lower end of the scale, but you don’t have to be sophisticated to kill people.”
Several experts and officials said the technology behind the foiled bombings in London seemed to be amateurish. While the attackers apparently tried to detonate the bombs using cellphones, “they didn’t go off because there were not top-grade people putting them together,” one Western official said.
If the plot turns out to be the work of a small, hitherto undetected cell, that could raise alarms that Britain’s terrorism threat is broader than the 2,000 suspected radicals known to the authorities, according to British and Western officials. The Western official said British investigators were pursuing several “good leads.”
The attack in Scotland also seemed marked by improvisation.
BAA, the company operating the airport, said a vehicle “drove into a front door at the check-in area” and “caught fire on impact.”
One witness, Scott Leeson, said the Jeep sped up to the building at around 30 miles per hour in an area where people usually drive much more slowly.
“Then the driver swerved the car around so he could ram straight into the door,” the Press Association news agency quoted Mr. Leeson as saying. “He must have been trying to smash straight through. Luckily he did not get the car too far in. He just managed to get the nose of the Jeep inside.”
Another witness, Lynsey McBean, 26, said, “We saw a green Cherokee drive straight into the front door of the airport but it got jammed. They were obviously trying to get it further inside the airport as the wheels were spinning and smoke was coming from them. One of the men, I think it was the driver, brought out a plastic petrol canister and poured it under the car. He then set light to it,” she said, according to the Press Association.
“At that point a policeman came over, the passenger got out of the car and punched him. At that point I began to run away. But when I looked back several people had run over to try and stop the men,” she said.
There were no claims of responsibility publicly for the car bombs on Friday, which were uncovered almost by accident when an ambulance crew and traffic wardens on Friday separately discovered the sedans.
But an online forum monitored by the SITE Institute, which tracks jihadist Web sites, asked whether London had been “craving explosions from Al Qaeda” after authorities in June bestowed a knighthood on the author Salman Rushdie, reviled by some radical Muslims for his book “The Satanic Verses.”
No “established link” exists between the knighthood and the foiled bombings, a British security official said.
The Times of London reported Saturday that the police had warned nightclub operators a few days ago of the threat of such attacks.
The two cars were parked around a corner from each other. The first to be discovered and disarmed was found outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in the Haymarket near Piccadilly Circus. The second was towed away for a parking infraction about 90 minutes later from nearby Cockspur Street leading to Trafalgar Square, the police said.
Sajjan M. Gohel, a security expert, said the police were pursuing a theory that the two bombs had been designed to explode one after the other — the first to bring people into the street and the second to cause great loss of life. The fact that Thursday night at Tiger Tiger was ladies’ night, he said, recalled a conspiracy in 2004 in which British-born bombers said they wanted to attack women at a nightclub, whom they viewed as promiscuous, in conversations monitored by British intelligence.