British Troops Deploy at London Airport Over Fear of Attack
By ALAN COWELL
ONDON, Feb. 11 ? Hundreds of British troops backed by armored cars took up position at Heathrow Airport today to guard against what the police called a potential Al Qaeda attack related to a major Islamic festival.
The deployment, the first of its kind in the nine years since Irish republican guerrillas launched a mortar attack on the same airport, coincided with a growing sense of alienation between Britain and some of its major European partners over what is depicted in many parts of the Continent as Washington's headlong rush toward war with Iraq.
Britain is Washington's biggest and most vocal European ally with tens of thousands of troops set to join American forces in the Persian Gulf region. But its alignment with the United States has left it on the pro-American side of a widening European divide. Only Monday, France, Germany and Russia urged an enlargement and expansion of United Nations weapons inspections in Iraq before conflict is contemplated, while France, Germany and Belgium blocked NATO attempts to begin planning for a war.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain dismissed the French and German counter-proposals today as "impossible to achieve unless and until you have the complete disarmament of Iraq."
Coming just four days before United Nations inspectors make a key report on President Saddam Hussein's compliance with their scrutiny of his weapons, the deepening European rift and the alert in London combined to provoke a sense of gathering crisis.
The British police said in a statement: "From time to time it is necessary to raise levels of security activity. We think it is prudent to do so now. The current strengthening of security is precautionary and is related to action being taken in other countries and the possibility that the end of the religious festival of Eid may erroneously be used by Al Qaeda and associated networks to mount attacks."
The Islamic festival of Eid al-Adha, which started today, celebrates the end of the hajj, or annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. But the police decision to link the occasion with potential terror attacks angered some Muslims.
"It is like suggesting that Christians would use Christmas to bomb Jewish, Muslim or Buddhist communities," said Massoud Shadjareh, chairman of the Islamic Human Rights Commission here.
But, after a string of arrests of North African Muslims in Britain linked to an alleged conspiracy to produce the toxin ricin, other Muslim leaders stirred a renewed furor with veiled threats that Britain faced a new wave of terrorism.
Sheik Omar Bakri, the London-based head of Al Muhajiroun, an Islamic body once accused of recruiting young Muslims to travel to Afghanistan during the rule of the Taliban, said in a radio interview that he believed radical Muslims in Britain were prepared to make suicide attacks.
"So I would warn people to take precautions," he said. "Do not go into government buildings, do not be in any financial institutions, keep away from these locations."
Contacted later, he modified the warning, saying he had not been referring to his own followers as potential terrorists. "It is not allowed for them to attack anybody physically," he said. "That is completely against Islam."
Sheik Bakri was one of a number of radical Islamic figures who, last August, issued a statement calling an attack on Iraq an attack on all Muslims.
The police did not go into detail about what had inspired today's alert at Heathrow, west of London, but witnesses said the police and army had also been sent to search rivers and other locations on the airport's flight path. Some 400 soldiers in camouflage uniform and armed with assault rifles took part in the deployment, the police said.
Some security experts suggested that the aim may have been to forestall an attack from the airport perimeters, similar to the Irish Republican Army attack on the Heathrow runways in 1994.
"It doesn't take an Einstein to work out that you can park around the perimeter and launch something like a missile," said Chris Yates, of Jane's Airport Review, a specialist publication.
Whatever its cause, the deployment could well be cited by British officials as further evidence of a heightened Al Qaeda threat as the United States and its allies enter what Mr. Straw called "the final, decisive phase in this long crisis" in Iraq.
In a speech to the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, Mr. Straw went out of his way to rebut proposals either made publicly by France and Germany or reported to be under consideration in Paris and Berlin.
Mr. Straw said the European counter-proposals included calls for intensified weapons inspections, the extension of the current no-flight zones in north and south Iraq to cover the entire country and the deployment of United Nations "blue-helmet" troops to help and protect weapons inspectors.
The British official said an increase in the number of weapons inspectors would not help resolve the crisis unless Mr. Hussein showed a readiness to comply with their mission, while an extension of the no-flight zone or the deployment of United Nations troops were "simply not feasible in the absence of complete Iraq cooperation and not necessary if we had complete Iraqi cooperation."
"They are a recipe for procrastination, indecision," Mr. Straw said.
London terror alert.
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