Posted on 07/06/2002 5:20:39 PM PDT by Pokey78
Terrorists are planning a series of spectacular attacks on American, British and Israeli targets to coincide with the anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Centre on 11 September last year.
Intelligence agencies in the UK, southern Asia and the Middle East are detecting an increased volume of communications between suspected al-Qaeda cells as the organisation, led by the fugitive Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden, accelerates efforts to pull off a major operation in the days around the anniversary of the New York and Washington attacks.
According to sources in Pakistan, al-Qaeda activists there have been given a three-month deadline to work with associates from local hardline Islamist organisations to target Western interests in the region.
British intelligence sources told The Observer that the UK is third on the list of al-Qaeda's preferred targets - after the US and Israel, and confirmed last night that credible reports of planned al-Qaeda attacks had grown.
'The threat remains high and the background noise has been growing over recent weeks. It's a question of when, rather than if, they will attempt another spectacular,' said one Whitehall source.
Western security agencies predominantly rely on communications intercepts, which they correlate with tip-offs from informers and information from questioning arrested suspects to alert them to forthcoming attacks. Increases in the volume of communications between known al-Qaeda suspects also suggest that action may be imminent.
Abu Zubaydah, the top al-Qaeda operative arrested in March in Pakistan, has told his American interrogators that the terrorist group was planning a wide range of 'mass casualty attacks'.
Bin Laden is believed to be hiding in the rugged mountains that line the frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many of his followers remain in Pakistan.
Last week four al-Qaeda gunmen and three paramilitary policemen died in a shoot-out near Kohat, on the borders of the semi-autonomous tribal areas where an estimated 300 al-Qaeda fighters are hiding.
Investigators in Karachi, probing last month's bomb attack on the US consulate in the city, believe that al-Qaeda operatives are now linking up with local Islamic terror and crime groups to carry out their attacks.
The new warning is the second such alert issued by intelligence services in the last seven months. The CIA and MI6 issued a warning at the end of last year after interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects in Camp X-Ray in Cuba revealed that the al-Qaeda high command had regrouped after the bombing of Afghanistan and was already planning attacks across the world.
Moroccan intelligence sources told The Observer last month that they had been told by their American and British counterparts that al-Qaeda reconnaissance cells had been sent from Afghanistan after the bombing of the Tora Bora mountain HQ last December with detailed instructions to carry out attacks on Western and Jewish targets.
As a result the Moroccans were last month able to foil a 'spectacular' designed to hit British and American troops in the Strait of Gibraltar by arresting a cell of three Saudi al-Qaeda operatives. Following the destruction of their support infrastructure in Afghanistan last autumn, bin Laden's operatives have dispersed throughout the region and into the Middle East.
· Additional reporting: Leyla Tabrizi
Their big attack on our nations birthday consisted of a limo driver gunning down 2 innocent civilians at LAX.
They are insane and pathetic.
It's the heat that makes these subhumans so crazy. They exacerbate the problem by wrapping their heads in smelly rags, causing them to run perpetual low grade fevers.
The whole thing could be solved by outlawing turbans like they did in Turkey and dropping hundreds of thousands of those battery operated fan/misters on the population.
A couple of million bottles of cold beer would put Allah down for good.
Can ANYONE post an actual source for that? I thought it was pure conjecture.
Always with the negative waves!
Bin Laden is dead.
Saddam is a dead man walking, the question is not 'if', but 'when'.
The kook at the airport in LA was a terrorist, yes, but easily dispatched and his work, while tragic, was futile.
I'll go back to what I said on this board the night of 911: the people who started this will rue the day they conceived it, and alot of slop is going to get cleaned up in the process, stuff that should have been done in the last 8 years.
And I've also said many times that this war will continue until the profit is taken out of terror: Victims of terror who lose wives and children are entitled to the lives and property of the perpetrators and their families.
That would change the rules of this engagement neatly and quickly.
What if we just nuke Mecca, Riyadh, Baghdad and the other large-scale nests on september 10th? Think that would distract them a little?
I think he always said that to Gavin Mcloud, AKA Capt Stubing from Love Boat fame.
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