Britain Monitoring Other Terror Plots, Official Says

NY Times / ALAN COWELL | August 13 2006

Four days after the British government said it had foiled a plot by Islamic radicals to bring down up to 10 passenger jets bound for the United States, Britain's highest-ranking law enforcement official said today that about 24 other terrorist conspiracies were still under surveillance in this country.

The figure - far higher than had been made known - seemed likely to alarm many people. It could reinforce calls among Muslim leaders and other opponents for Prime Minister Tony Blair to reverse foreign policies in the Muslim world described by Islamic leaders on Friday as providing "ammunition to extremists that threaten us all."

Speaking in an interview on BBC television, the British home secretary, John Reid, said that since last year's July bombings, British security services had foiled what he described as four other major conspiracies.

Apparently seeking to bolster official denials of a link between terrorism and Britain's alliance with the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. Reid also said officials had learned that Al Qaeda first tried to attack a target in Birmingham, Britain, in 2000. "So this has been a long-going threat but it is a chronic one and it is a severe one," he said.

"We now think in retrospect that the first Al Qaeda plot, for instance against this country, preceded by quite a while our intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan and actually preceded 9/11," he said. The remark seemed to be an indirect confirmation, for the first time, that the government saw the hand of Al Qaeda in the latest conspiracy.

Mr. Reid did not give details of any of these purported plots.

Asked about a report in the British Sunday newspaper The Observer that police were hunting "two dozen" terror cells in Britain, Mr. Reid said: "I'm not going to confirm an exact number but I wouldn't deny that that would indicate the number of major conspiracies that we are trying to look at. There would be more which are not at the center of our considerations and there may be more that we don't know about at all."

He also appeared to suggest that some conspirators associated with the plot disclosed last week may still be at large. "We believe it was a major, major plot," he said, describing the police investigation as "ongoing."

"We believe we have the main targets," he said, but did not rule out the idea that other people at large might still be planning an attack or "prepared to use this opportunity to carry out a terrorist attack."

Two weeks after the bombings of July.7, 2005, when four suicide bombers killed 52 commuters on the London transport system, another group attempted what seemed a copycat attack that failed only when its explosives did not detonate.

News of the latest plot on Thursday set off a huge security clamp-down at British airports - particularly at Heathrow in London, Europe's busiest - that resulted in equally huge delays and cancellations in flight schedules. Two airlines, British Airways and Ryanair, warned Saturday that unless security procedures were accelerated, airports would no longer be able to cope with the hundreds of thousands of passengers trying to fly out of Britain every day.

Mr. Reid hinted the security clamp-down may be eased, saying it was "time limited." But he did not say when.

He also said the latest plot provided fresh evidence to support police demands for counterterrorism laws to be amended to permit detention of people without trial or charge for 90 days. The current limit is 28 days.

While the government insists that the latest plot was real, many of its critics today started to question publicly the veracity of the government's depiction of it, citing previous occasions - including an intelligence dossier used to justify the invasion of Iraq 2003 - when official assertions of a threat proved wrong.

Mr. Blair is on vacation in the Caribbean. His absence has been criticized by adversaries who contend that if the plot was as serious as Mr. Reid and others maintain, he should return home.

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