Al-Qaeda Terror Plot (Pakistan) in the U.K.
This must be a case of those “so-called terrorists” from Pakistan that Helen Thomas was talking about! This would have been one heck of a “man-made disaster” as Janet Napolitano would also say. Glad to know that we have our “Overseas Contingency Operation” intact and ready to go!/Sarc.
Sources told The Daily Telegraph that the arrests of 12 men in the north west of England on Wednesday were linked to a suspected plan to launch a devastating attack this weekend.
Some of the suspects were watched by MI5 agents as they filmed themselves outside the Trafford Centre on the edge of Manchester, the Arndale Centre in the city centre, and the nearby St Ann’s Square.
Police were forced to round up the alleged plotters after they were overheard discussing dates, understood to include the Easter bank holiday, one of the busiest shopping weekends of the year.
“It could have been the next few days and they were talking about 10 days at the outside,” one source said. “We had to act.” Police are now engaged in a search for an alleged bomb factory, where explosives might have been assembled.
If such a plot was carried out, it would almost certainly have been Britain’s worst terrorist attack, with the potential to cause more deaths than the suicide attacks of July 7, 2005, when 52 people were murdered.
Officials have now determined that the attack was being orchestrated by militant Pakistani’s involved with Al-Qaeda and were using students and the student visa system to attempt the latest attack.
Suspects being questioned today after one of the biggest anti-terror operations since the July 7 attacks exploited lax student visa regulations to enter the UK from Pakistan, Whitehall sources said yesterday.
As police continued searches in Liverpool, Manchester and Clitheroe, Lancashire, after the raids on Wednesday, the Home Office said student visa checks had been tightened in the last fortnight because of widespread abuses of the system.
There are concerns inside government and the security services that the 11 Pakistani nationals being held in the north of England could have gained entry on student visas in order to form a sleeper cell. Gordon Brown talked of the police having foiled a “very big terrorist plot”.
The operation which led to the arrest of the men, along with one Briton who is said to have roots in the same tribal area, was rushed forward after the country’s top anti-terror officer carried papers under his arm detailing the raids as he walked into 10 Downing Street in full view of photographers.
Apologising for the blunder, Bob Quick, the Met’s head of specialist operations, resigned from his post yesterday. His departure reignited tensions over the running of the force after London mayor Boris Johnson broke the news of the resignation on BBC Radio 4, angering the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, and Scotland Yard.
