Posted on 08/10/2006 3:00:54 AM PDT by HAL9000
Police statement on airline bombing plot
LONDON (Reuters) - Following is the full text of a statement issued by London Deputy Commissioner, Paul Stephenson on Thursday morning:
"We are confident that we have disrupted a plan by terrorists to cause untold death and destruction and commit mass murder.
The Commissioner has been fully briefed and he is at New Scotland Yard today. He and I want to pay tribute to officers from the Met's Anti-Terrorist Branch and the security services for the work they have undertaken to disrupt these activities.
We believe that the terrorists' aim was to smuggle explosives onto airplanes in hand luggage and to detonate these in flight.
We also believe that the intended targets were flights from the UK to the USA.
Overnight we have arrested 21 people. The majority of those arrests have been in London but we have also made arrests in Thames Valley and Birmingham. We are currently searching a number of addresses.
We are grateful to our colleagues in other force areas for their support.
As the operation got under way we spoke to community leaders to make them aware that a major anti-terrorist operation was taking place but without giving specific details about locations. This extensive dialogue will continue throughout the operation.
We would like to reassure the public that this operation was carried out with public safety upper most in our minds. This is a major operation, which will inevitably be lengthy and complex. The UK is now at the highest possible level of alert.
We will consider the threat in its wider sense and take whatever action is necessary to protect people in London and throughout the country.
Measures have already been put in place to restrict hand luggage taken onto aircraft. This will inevitably cause significant delay and we ask people to remain calm, patient and vigilant at this very difficult time.
Put simply this was a plot to commit mass murder on an unimaginable scale."
prairie's one of the real good guys around here who really really comprehends the terrorist threat (even if she is a girl.) I suspect you recognize her nic now, and simply hadn't read who post#51 was from.
I hope they are OK with me checking on 3 bags, since I have to check on the bag I would have carried on.
Carolyn
Some good friends of mine with 7 month old twin boys were scheduled to fly back to Indianpolis today. They have been over there for 2 months while he was taking a class.
It seems a reasonable guess that they were intending to blow them up over US cities. I'm still wondering if there was even more lethal plans.
Two things I haven't seen on thread yet:
---Terrorists had definite link to AlQueda (surprise, surprise)
---Planes destined for Washington, NY, and California.(says CNN)
Heh- This hurts Airbus with its new plane that holds 650? passengers. One Jihadist psycho could bring down that plane with a decent bomb in the checked in luggage
Will be released by the middle of next week in time for weekly prayers.
If it is a co-ordinated attack, it would not take much more than a six pack of soda cans filled with ammonia and another six pack of bleach to create a noxious gas on a plane. Considering the reaction, checking all liquids, my guess is they were trying something along those lines. While I do not think that would be "an unimaginable scale" compared to 9/11, it could easily be done.
I haven´t understand her intention in #51. That´s it. I thought she has misunderstood my post she was replying to, but that wasn´t the case. Oh man, I wished I hadn´t replied! *sinking in the floor*
From what I've seen on the tube you're gonna have to combine it into the other two.
Can you imagine having to put your laptop in checked luggage? I can't imagine it surviving the trip...
4 of 25 are already set free.
They claimed they were dated for lunch. /s
Unimaginable Scale? How many passengers are normally on a Tran-Atlantic flight?
No, even between all the clothes in the suitcase. Why the he** do they have to give their laptops away? Laptops are screened and the security looks closely on them. I never got the impression that I could hide something in laptops from them.
Do you know where these planes would have gone down??
That's one heck of a list..unprecedented. Wow.
Up to ten flights..blown up over our major cities and God only knows what the target buildings were..shudder..
sw
Probably not as many as the densly populated urban area it might have come down in.
God Bless the Brits.Amen to that!
LOL- that is the one thing about the internet -- you can't see the twinkle in the eye of the person you're talking to when they're joking with you.
It's easy to get nabbed by sarcasm like that. It's happened to all of us here.
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