A vehicle burned on Saturday after it hit a section of Glasgow Airport.
LONDON, Sunday, July 1 — British officials raised the country’s terrorism threat alert to its highest level on Saturday after two men slammed an S.U.V. into entrance doors at Glasgow Airport and turned the vehicle into a potentially lethal fireball.
Less than 38 hours earlier the police uncovered two cars in London rigged to explode with gasoline, gas canisters and nails.
Early Sunday, after a day of fast-moving developments, the London police announced that two people had been arrested in Cheshire, in northwest England, “in connection with the events in London and Scotland.”
The arrests were in addition to those of the two occupants of the blazing car at Glasgow Airport. A witness to the attack said on BBC television that one of the car’s occupants had been ablaze from head to foot, and as he struggled with the police, “was throwing punches and shouting ‘Allah, Allah.’ ”
Britain’s threat level is now at “critical,” meaning another attack is
considered imminent. The threat has not been as high since last year,
after authorities discovered what they called a plot to attack
trans-Atlantic airliners with liquid explosives.
A British security official, who like many other officials who disclosed information insisted on anonymity, said Saturday that 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 relate to the way the London car bombs and Glasgow airport attack were planned, using vehicles and gasoline, the official said.
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 any threat to the United States.
But the federal government took a number of steps, given the events in Britain and the approaching July 4 holiday, to elevate security.
Homeland Security officials said they included additional bomb detection canine teams at airports and behavior-detection squads.
The New York City police said they were monitoring events in London and Scotland and were maintaining the heightened security that began after the discovery of the car bombs in London.
The measures include sending officers into parking garages with sensors that detect the presence of chemical, biological and radiological agents, and closely monitoring tourist areas, including nightclubs, said the department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne.
Although there were questions throughout the day about whether the Glasgow vehicle crashed intentionally, by Saturday night, Sir William Rae, the chief constable of the Strathclyde area around Glasgow, said it 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, and the hospital was evacuated. Mr. Rae declined to comment on reporters’ suggestions that the assailant — said to be in critical condition — had been wearing an explosive belt. A person with knowledge of the investigation, however, 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.
The airport in Liverpool was also closed on Saturday, apparently reflecting a fresh area of concern in an increasingly jittery nation.
In July 2005, four suicide bombers killed 52 people on London’s transit system, 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 said the two men in the Glasgow attack were South Asian.
In office only since Wednesday, 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.”
Saturday was the first full day of the school summer vacations; thousands of people were awaiting flights in Glasgow. The sight of the dark green Jeep Cherokee smashing into the building and bursting into flames spread panic and terror in the terminal. A Glasgow police spokeswomen, Elisa Dunn, said that five bystanders were injured, and that one was hospitalized for a leg injury, according to The Associated Press.
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.
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 spread mayhem.
The alert began early Friday, when the two cars, Mercedes sedans, were found in the central West End theater and nightclub district.
After the midafternoon crash through doors at Glasgow Airport on Saturday, 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 attack came as London — already worried by 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 Mr. Rae, the Scottish constable, said there had been no intelligence warning of an attack in Glasgow.
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. Likewise, in the United States, Mr. Chertoff held so-called principals meetings, involving other cabinet-level officials. And officials with the Transportation Security Administration held a conference call with airport and airline officials from around the United States.
In London, counterterrorism experts suggested that whoever 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 their plan seemed to be modeled on terrorist attacks in Iraq.
Several experts and officials said the technology behind the London car bombs seemed 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, unknown cell, that could raise alarms that Britain’s terrorism threat is broader than the 2,000 suspected radicals known to the authorities. The Western official said British investigators were pursuing several “good leads.”
The attack in Scotland also seemed marked by improvisation.
BAA, the company that runs 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 had sped up to the building at around 30 miles per hour.
“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.”
Another witness, Lynsey McBean, 26, told the Press Association: “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 farther 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.
“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.”
There were no public claims of responsibility for the car bombs on Friday, which were uncovered almost by accident when an ambulance crew and traffic wardens separately discovered the sedans.
But a posting on 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 car bombs, 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 attack.
The two cars were parked around a corner from each other. The first to be discovered and disarmed was outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in the Haymarket near Piccadilly Circus. The second had been nearby on Cockspur Street leading to Trafalgar Square but towed for a parking infraction about 90 minutes later, the police said.
Sajjan M. Gohel, a security expert, said the police were pursuing a theory that the two car 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.
Source: The New York Times (by e-mail)
Comment: now the British threat level has been raised to the highest level, it is proven that the British government is expecting further attacks [from Al Qaeda?]. The question now is of course or the recent events in London and in Glasgow (in good old Scotland!) will be followed by other attacks in other Western cities. It looks like the U.S. isn’t expecting attacks in the homeland, though measures have been taken to protect people and buildings from eventual attacks carried out by terrorists.
“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 any threat to the United States.
But the federal government took a number of steps, given the events in
Britain and the approaching July 4 holiday, to elevate security.
Homeland Security officials said they included additional bomb
detection canine teams at airports and behavior-detection squads.
The New York City police said they were monitoring events in London and
Scotland and were maintaining the heightened security that began after
the discovery of the car bombs in London.
The measures include sending officers into parking garages with sensors
that detect the presence of chemical, biological and radiological
agents, and closely monitoring tourist areas, including nightclubs,
said the department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne”
technorati tags:attacks, attack, London, New, York, U.S., USA, US, U.S.A., United, States, of, America, homeland, security
The Lockheed Martin F-35C, depicted here in an artist’s
