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Europe
Turks warned of al-Qaeda glider attack
2004-07-03
Turkish authorities received a warning that al-Qaida was planning to use a bomb-laden glider in a suicide attack targeting world leaders at the NATO summit in Istanbul, the city’s police chief was quoted as saying. In an newspaper interview published yesterday, Istanbul police chief Celalettin Cerrah said the intelligence came from foreign sources and described such a plot as farfetched. "To tell you the truth, we did not find it very realistic," Cerrah told the daily newspaper Hurriyet.
Somebody's been watching too many James Bond movies...
Still, the intelligence was immediately passed on to Turkey’s military, which was responsible for ensuring the security of airspace over the city during the summit, the police chief said. According to a tip Cerrah said was received by Turkey’s national intelligence service MIT from unspecified foreign sources, Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network was planning to use a bomb-laden glider to target a hotel in Istanbul where at least one of NATO leaders was staying during the June 28-29 summit. The aircraft was supposed to take off from a neighbouring country and approach the city by flying over the Black Sea, Cerrah said. The police chief did not say in the interview which hotel was supposedly targeted. But the police official who spoke to the AP yesterday said it was the hotel where US President George W. Bush was staying. "They had chosen a glider because radar would not spot it," Cerrah told the newspaper. "And since it flies without an engine, it would approach the target in silence."

Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac, and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder were among the world leaders who attended the summit, which took place amid extremely tight security. More than 23,000 police were mobilised, F-16 warplanes patrolled the skies and AWACS early-warning planes dispatched by NATO helped monitor a no-fly zone over Istanbul. Police spokesman Ramazan Er revealed on Friday that authorities found and defused explosives in a garage at Istanbul’s airport only hours before the arrival of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week. Another police official said a small Marxist group was believed to have been involved. The group, MLKP-FESK, claimed responsibility for a small blast last week in Ankara outside the hotel where Bush had been scheduled to stay.
Posted by:Dan Darling

#6  Glide for Effect!

Quick!!! Cue up Flight of the Valkyries!!
Posted by: Alaska Paul   2004-07-03 7:54:33 PM  

#5  LOL MarkO
2+ is a barrage!
Posted by: Shipman   2004-07-03 6:23:06 PM  

#4  Gliders of Doom™?
Posted by: beer_me   2004-07-03 5:14:29 PM  

#3  Okay, so now we have two definitions to work with (along with an observation from a while back):

Terrorist Guided Missile: Bomb laden splodey-dope on a glider
Terrorist Artillery: 2+ splodey-dopes and a trampoline

Mark
Posted by: MarkO   2004-07-03 4:13:15 PM  

#2  Deadly AQ glider infantry...
Seriously, since Eben Emanuel or whatever it was
has there ever been a successful glider attack?
Posted by: Shipman   2004-07-03 3:55:09 PM  

#1  With all that coastline, Ol' Erdogan should be worrying about those amphibians...
Posted by: .com   2004-07-03 3:50:32 PM  

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