Posted on 01/24/2004 7:09:49 AM PST by knighthawk
EXPERTS from Scotland Yard, the FBI and international civil aviation agencies held closed-door meetings yesterday on how to secure airports against the lethal portable rockets that terrorists are trying to acquire.
The talks, held at the Vienna headquarters of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, were examining how to minimise the threat of attacks by terrorists armed with shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles.
"We know that al-Qaeda has these weapons, we know that they’ve used them, and we know that they’ll use them again," said Brian Woo, head of the OSCE’s anti-terrorism unit.
The experts declined to discuss specific measures being taken to secure airports and airliners, but credited tighter security for the lack of attacks on commercial airliners in the past 14 months.
The last known attempt was in November 2002, when two missiles narrowly missed an Israeli chartered airliner taking off from the airport in Mombasa, Kenya, with tourists returning to Israel. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attempt.
Anti-terrorism officials from the United States and Britain, along with representatives from 40 of the 55 nations that make up the OSCE, said estimates of the number of portable missiles circulating on black markets worldwide run into the hundreds of thousands.
Although more than 600 people have been killed in about 40 attacks over the past three decades, most of the shootings involved military aircraft in war zones.
But with airport security noticeably tightened after the 11 September attacks, and hijackings of commercial aircraft no longer as easy, terrorists are rediscovering the strategic advantages of shoulder-fired missiles.
The rockets chase the heat produced by an aircraft engine and explode on impact. They are effective only while the target plane is flying low and slow, meaning during takeoff and landing.
"Even if a missile misses an aircraft, it will have a devastating impact on the airport and the local economy," said a diplomat familiar with yesterday’s talks.
A source said intelligence suggests that terrorists are actively working to acquire such missiles and governments must take the threat seriously.
"As the availability becomes better known to terrorists, I think we’ll see an increase in attempts," he warned.
Last summer, Briton Hemant Lakhani was arrested in New York in an international sting operation after he allegedly tried to sell a dummy Russian-made SA-18 Igla missile to undercover agents posing as terrorists.
Although weapons experts say the Igla is the most sophisticated, accurate and hard-to-obtain portable rocket, there are other choices for terrorists, including hundreds of American-made Stinger shoulder-fired missiles, which the United States sold to Afghanistan in the 1980s.
There are also thousands of a class of missile known in the West as the SA-7 Grail and in Russia as the Strela, or Arrow, which have been produced in Russia, Eastern Europe, China, the former Yugoslavia, Egypt and other countries.
Some have sold for as little as £270, according to US intelligence. They tend to weigh just 35lb to 40lb, and their 5ft-long tubes are compact enough to be easily concealed in a large bag.
Although their performance varies depending on the type, the missiles tend to have a minimum range of 600yd and a maximum of roughly three miles, and can hit airborne targets ranging from 50ft to 10,000ft.
The army of Serbia-Montenegro yesterday began destroying about 1,200 Strela missiles, widely used by Iraqi insurgents to attack US helicopters. The US paid for the destruction outside Belgrade.
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