Intelligence officials hunting Islamist terrorists suspected of planning attacks on British Airways flights believe they may be carrying legitimate American, UK or other European passports to try to beat airport security.
| That'd baffle me, alright. I thought Islamists always carried home-made passports? |
According to US sources, last week’s cancellation of the BA flights to Washington and Riyadh in Saudi Arabia was triggered by fear that terrorists with legitimate ’clean aliases’ were planning attacks over the New Year holiday. The alert comes amid compelling new evidence of determined efforts by jihadist groups to recruit suicide bombers in the UK and Europe both for operations against the American-led coalition in Iraq and against domestic targets.
| They're especially looking for that "white meat," not that Islamists could be racist in any manner, of course... |
Intercepts from a Western intelligence agency seen by The Observer reveal that jihadists regard London as a key financing and recruiting centre for their efforts. Although Whitehall sources strongly denied suggestions that UK passport holders were suspected in the threat to British Airways, telephone intercepts seen by this newspaper make clear that Islamist terror cells are deliberately targeting ’well-educated’ foreigners, Britons among them. In one call, an unidentified jihadist tells a colleague: ’We need foreigners. We have Albanians, Swiss and English... all that is important is that they are of a high cultural level ... businessmen, professors, engineers, doctors and teachers.’
| "Not the dirtbags we usually get..." |
The focus on well-educated, capable and highly committed ’foreigners’ was a hallmark of the al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, which ran a strict selection policy for its students. Heightened tension over airline security was underscored by the crash yesterday of an Egyptian charter jet flying from the resort of Sharm-el-Sheikh to Paris with the loss of all 148 lives on board. Although terrorism was ruled out as a cause of the crash in favour of mechanical failure, yesterday’s crash into the Red Sea shocked the airline industry at a time of unprecedented fears over safety.
| "Just a maintenance problem," they said — immediately... |
Analysts believe that al-Qaeda and other allied jihadist terrorist networks have stepped up efforts in the last 12 months to recruit US, UK and other foreign nationals who can more easily penetrate the heightened security environment that has been in place since the attacks on the US on 11 September 2001. Intelligence sources believe that since the war in Iraq, dormant networks that once recruited and fed fighters into Afghanistan have been reactivated and reorganised for a new global jihad aimed at the US and its allies; this includes cells in the UK.
| I thought the cells in the UK kept running 24/7? |
According to the same sources, the recruiting networks have shown the ability to adapt quickly to operations targeted against them, moving recruitment and other activities away from mosques, where they know they are being watched, to other areas of operation. The disclosure comes after UK and US transport and security officials had grounded British Airways flight 223 to Washington’s Dulles International Airport on Thursday and Friday of last week after an intelligence tip-off that it was the target of an attack over the New Year holiday period. Wednesday’s flight had been intercepted by US fighter jets an hour from its destination.
| If they'd wanted to go down, we'd have helped them down... |
In recent months mounting evidence has emerged that the recruitment effort has been focused on disaffected members of communities that have been granted asylum in the UK and elsewhere, some of whom have been recruited for suicide operations in Iraq, including a number of British-based Islamist radicals.
| Granted assylum, eh? If the United States was taken over by Islamists, or Nazis, or Communists, or Indymedia, and I had to find someplace to give me assylum, I'd feel grateful to my new home, rather than make war against it. |
The Observer revealed last November that a martial arts expert from Sheffield was used in a suicide mission inside Iraq. In April, two British students staged a suicide attack in Tel Aviv, again using their British passports to reach their target in Israel. |