l Qaeda has warned Britain that it will continue to find ways to bypass its security and plans to ramp up airborne attacks using passenger jets, it was revealed Sunday.
The terrorist network said it was training a new generation of bomb makers and intended to target more commercial airliners, having successfully managed to smuggle powerful explosives on board cargo planes.
“The following phase would be for us to use ... similar devices on civilian aircraft in western countries,” the group’s Yemen-based offshoot said in the latest edition of its propaganda magazine.
It also announced plans to downgrade its use of suicide bombers and step up plots to disrupt transatlantic trade.
Outlining what it calls “Operation Hemorrhage,” the group said it wants to focus on causing maximum economic damage.
“We are laying out for our enemies our plans in advance because ... our objective is not maximum kill but to cause a hemorrhage in the aviation industry, an industry that is so vital for trade and transportation between the US and Europe,” the group said in the English-language magazine, published online last week.
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) claimed credit for the two unexploded bombs that came close to blowing up cargo planes bound for America last month. One of the flights was intercepted at East Midlands airport. The group said it was happy to deploy a tactic “that does not require us to put a mujahid [holy warrior] on board a plane”.
AQAP boasted that the operation involved a team of “less than six brothers,” took just three months to plan and cost only US$4,200. The price included two Nokia mobile phones at $150 each, two Hewlett-Packard printers at $300 each, as well as the cost of shipping.
The bombs evaded security checks because they used PETN, a powerful form of explosive that is organic and difficult for airport scanners to detect. They were hidden in printer toner cartridges.
Although the plot was foiled, AQAP said it will have cost the West billions of dollars in new security measures. “That is why we dropped into one of the boxes a [Charles Dickens] novel titled 'Great Expectations,'” it said.
Britain banned toner cartridges from hand luggage in the wake of the plot. In an ominous response last week, AQAP said: “The British government said that if a toner weighs more than 500g [one pound] it won’t be allowed on board a plane. Who is the genius who came up with this suggestion? Do you think that we have nothing to send but printers?”
Last week Sir Paul Stephenson, the Metropolitan police commissioner, said the terrorist threat to Britain was now at its highest since the Glasgow airport and Tiger Tiger nightclub bombing attempts in 2007. He said that aviation continued to pose a particular risk.
AQAP appears to confirm the fears of western security agencies that it was training bomb makers to build devices that cannot be detected, even by the most advanced airport security.
It said its master bomb maker, Ibrahim al Asiri, a wanted Saudi militant who is the key suspect in the cargo bomb plot, " is safe and well. He is currently busy teaching a new batch of students the latest in bomb making skills”.
The magazine, called "Inspire," warned that the cargo bomb plot was just the beginning of a “multi-phased operation.”
It said it wants to disseminate the technical details of the devices to followers around the world. More bombs would then be mailed by courier firms through the cargo system, starting off in countries such as Somalia, which cannot necessarily afford effective airport scanning equipment.
Some 60 percent of global air cargo travels on passenger planes at some point on its journey and the group says it wants to use such devices against civilian aircraft in the West.
Colonel Richard Kemp, former chairman of the intelligence group at Cobra, the government’s emergency committee, said al Qaeda’s interest in suicide attacks would not diminish.
He said: “This group, which also attempted a suicide attack against an aircraft a year ago, and other al Qaeda cells around the world, will continue to attempt all forms of mass casualty attack that they believe may stand a chance of success. It is this judgment -- the likelihood of success -- that will determine how they attack.”
