LONDON, 16 August 2006 — After last Thursday’s alleged London terror plot come the recriminations. Passenger fury at the continuing airport chaos — now in its sixth day — and even after the downgrading of the security alert and a partial relaxation of the ban on hand luggage on Monday, has precipitated a war of words between British Airways (BA) and the British Airports Authority (BAA), who own and run the country’s major airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted, the three airports that have borne the brunt of the travel misery.
At Heathrow alone some 20,000 items of luggage belonging to mainly BA customers have gone missing. Flight cancellations and long queues due to the increased security are still the order of the day, although the situation, according to some passengers on certain routes is “slowly getting back to normal.” Lost revenues to BA from flight cancellations alone are estimated at 40 million pounds.
So incensed is BA that Chief Executive Willie Walsh is threatening to sue BAA for compensation over its handling of the situation, especially the lack of forward planning in the eventuality of a major aviation security incident such as last Thursday’s foiled alleged terror plan aimed at blowing up nine planes in midair on the trans-Atlantic route between the UK and major US cities.
“Since 9/11, everyone in the industry has known there might be times when extra security measures needed to be put in place. Yet when the moment struck, BAA had no plan ready to keep Heathrow functioning properly,” complained Walsh.
BAA’s Chief Executive Tony Douglas retorted that the airline industry had faced a “national security challenge” on an “unprecedented scale.” He warned BA that the lost luggage items was the airline’s responsibility.
Another airline chief, Ryanair Chief Executive Michael O’Leary accused BAA of “allowing the terrorists to disrupt the airline transport industry of the UK.”
Meanwhile, British police detained one more person yesterday. Police said they had arrested another suspect in the Thames Valley area in southeastern Britain, where police raided several houses last week.
UK Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander added new gloom to the travel misery faced by thousands of passengers warning that “fundamental” changes to the new security regime are “unlikely.” Alexander said the government reserves “absolutely the right to modify our security requirement as and when we become aware of new tactics and techniques which might be used against us.”
However, a potentially more explosive problem looming on the horizon is the possibility that transport officials are considering “passenger profiling”, where airlines identify people who, on grounds of such things as conduct or appearance, they believe could pose a risk to security.
But Metropolitan Police Chief Superintendent Ali Dizaei, the most senior Muslim police officer in the UK, warned on BBC’s Newsnight program that screening passengers could discriminate against Asians and could create a new criminal offense of “traveling whilst Asian. That’s unpalatable to everyone. It is communities that defeat terrorism, and what we don’t want to do is to alienate the very communities who are going to help us catch terrorists.”
David Cameron, leader of the opposition Conservative Party, weighed in with a stinging attack on Tony Blair’s government “for not doing enough to fight Islamist extremists at home or to protect our security.”
At a press conference yesterday, he criticized a funding freeze planned for the Home Office; called on intercept evidence to be allowed in British courts; and urged the government to take tougher action to deport “preachers of hate” and to enforce existing anti-terror laws.
“Why have so few, if any, (Muslim) preachers of hate been prosecuted or expelled, with those that have gone having done so voluntarily? And why has so little been done to use the existing law to deal with the radicalization that is rife within our shores,” he demanded to know.
He called for a “a more hard-nosed defense of liberty” and a “firm leadership from moderate Muslim opinion.”
Shahid Malik, Labour MP for Dewsbury, and one of the signatories of the open letter to Blair on Sunday asking him to change his foreign policy regarding the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan saying that it was fueling extremism and risking lives at home and abroad, dismissed Cameron’s attack as “shocking” and, which he said, showed “how out of depth he (Cameron) really is in his new role.”
Malik and his fellow Muslim MPs met Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott yesterday to discuss how to tackle extremism within the Muslim communities.
The government also announced that it is stepping up efforts to engage with the Muslim community in the wake of last week’s terror raids.
Over the coming weeks, ministers, led by Ruth Kelly, the secretary of state for communities, who works out of the deputy prime minister’s office, will visit Muslim communities and local authorities in nine cities across the UK, including London, Bradford, Bolton, Oldham, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham.
UK Defense Secretary Des Browne, while reiterating that British foreign policy is not to blame for radicalizing young British Muslims and for people becoming “indiscriminate terrorist killers”, acknowledged that foreign policy gave “a new focus to people in terms of the way they want to present this particular problem. I don’t believe that it changes people’s minds. I believe that it may give them a focus around which they want to frame their grievances.
But “the nature of this terrorism predates our involvement...in Iraq or Afghanistan”, he told BBC Radio 4 yesterday.
Police, meanwhile, continue to question 23 terror suspects detained last Thursday. They have until today to hold them unless they apply for an extension from the courts to detain them for a further week. The London Evening Standard yesterday reported that a huge money transfer from the UK was the key that led MI5 and intelligence officials in Britain and Pakistan to uncover the alleged jet bomb plot. The paper, quoting intelligence sources, stressed that up to three million pounds collected in the UK through charities to help the victims of the devastating earthquake in Pakistani Kashmir, may have been siphoned off by the terror suspects and used to prepare the alleged attacks.
Pakistan yesterday offered to extradite a British national, Rashid Rauf, arrested in Pakistan last week who is a brother of Tayib Rauf, one of the alleged plotters arrested in London. Rauf has reportedly confessed about his involvement in the alleged plot. Pakistani sources stressed that no formal request for Rauf’s extradition has been received from London.
