| Submit your comments on this article |
| Britain |
| Ricin plot aimed more at causing fear than death |
| 2005-04-15 |
| The cracking of an al Qaeda poison plot in Britain lends credence to longstanding warnings from police and security services that militants would attempt an attack using toxins. But experts say that, while deadly agents such as ricin are relatively easy to produce even in the home, they are more suited to sowing panic than inflicting mass casualties. In Britain's highest-profile Islamist militant trial, Algerian Kamel Bourgass was convicted on Wednesday of plotting poison or bomb attacks and jailed for 17 years. He had been separately sentenced to 22 years for killing a policeman. While no actual poison was found, police discovered recipes and ingredients for making ricin, cyanide and other toxins. Toxicologists said ricin, extracted from castor beans and fatal even in doses of less than a milligram, could easily be made in an ordinary kitchen. "It's rather easy to do that and you don't need any special training. If you have a recipe you probably can do that, yes," said Professor Ralf Stahlmann of the Free University of Berlin. Professor Harry Smith of Britain's Birmingham University said that while ricin was "all right for assassinating people," it was unsuitable for killing large numbers. "It's a question of disseminating a large amount of it. Dispersal is the hard part," he said. Bourgass and eight other men, who were all acquitted, were arrested in 2003 after another suspect told Algerian authorities they were keeping ricin in a jar of skin cream and planned to smear it on door handles in London. Stahlmann and Smith both said such a plan would have failed, because ricin is poorly absorbed through the skin. It is most deadly when injected -- as in the notorious case of Bulgarian exile Georgi Markov, who died after being stabbed in the leg with a ricin-tipped umbrella in London in 1978. Despite the difficulties faced by militants in dispersing poisons to kill on a large scale, security officials fear any such incident could sow widespread panic. Some analysts use the term "weapons of mass disruption" to describe the kind of arms -- from dirty bombs to biological agents -- that could create havoc without necessarily claiming large numbers of casualties. Intelligence sources say al Qaeda's interest in chemical and biological agents is well documented. An attack by such means would be in keeping with its predilection for constantly varying its tactics and reaching for new weapons and targets. Al Qaeda manuals on preparation of biological agents were discovered at the group's training camps in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in 2001. Bourgass had attended one such camp. In an overview of the network's capabilities, German foreign intelligence chief August Hanning told a security conference in Berlin this week that al Qaeda was already assumed to possess a range of biological and chemical weapons. Among biological agents, he said it had acquired poisons such as botulinum and ricin, may have bacteria like anthrax and plague, but was unlikely to have got its hands on viruses, such as Ebola and smallpox. Among chemical weapons, Hanning said al Qaeda was assumed to have poison gases, probably had blistering agents like lewisite, which attack the skin, and possibly also nerve agents like soman and sarin, the substance that killed 12 people in a 1995 attack by the Aum Shinri Kyo cult on the Tokyo subway. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |