The Hindu : Front Page : Flawed British policies may have facilitated Glasgow bombing

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jul 11, 2007
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Flawed British policies may have facilitated Glasgow bombing

Praveen Swami

Concern mounts over U.K.’s possible failure to pass on information

May have left Bangalore vulnerable to terrorist strike
Indian authorities could have kept Ahmed under surveillance

NEW DELHI: Flawed British intelligence-sharing policies may have facilitated the Glasgow airport car-bomb attack – and even left Bangalore vulnerable to a major terrorist strike, Indian counter-terrorism authorities believe.

Highly placed sources told The Hindu that there was mounting concern in India’s intelligence community about reports that the United Kingdom’s domestic intelligence service, MI5, may have known of Glasgow suicide-bomber Kafeel Ahmed’s terror links over four years ago. According to the sources, India was never notified of these links – a failure which allowed Ahmed to prepare for the Glasgow strike free of surveillance.

On Sunday, the London-based Observer newspaper had reported that Mr. Ahmed was known to have met a top al-Qaeda operative over four years ago. According to the newspaper, bomb-maker Abbas Boutrab met with the Bangalore-based enginee ring student in Belfast, where Ahmed was then a graduate student at Queen’s University. If the report is correct, Ahmed was most likely to have been placed under surveillance by MI5.

Mr. Boutrab was arrested in April, 2003, from a home in Northern Ireland’s Antrim county. At first held on immigration-fraud charges, police later found that he possessed compact discs with manuals on turning an ordinary camera and its components into a bomb. A manual found on the discs suggested that al-Qaeda hoped to use poor security at some African airports to smuggle such a device on to a commercial airliner.

While no information is available on the substance or intensity of the contact between Mr. Boutrab and Mr. Ahmed, the fact that no arrest was made suggests the United Kingdom’s counter-terrorism services discovered nothing that would have justified a criminal prosecution. However, Indian intelligence officials note, the United Kingdom ought to have notified India of Mr. Ahmed’s contacts – in its own interests.

Dangerous consequences

As a result of the U.K.’s decision not to share what information it had, India’s domestic intelligence services made no effort to monitor Mr. Ahmed’s activities when he finished his degree and returned home in 2004. Again, Mr. Ahmed was not subjected to surveillance during the six months he spent in Bangalore in 2005-2006: the time he is now known to have begun downloading information on manufacturing bombs.

Sources told The Hindu that little had been done to implement international promises of seamless intelligence cooperation made in the wake of the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks on the U.S. Much counter-terrorism intelligence w ork, though, flirts with the fringes of the U.K.’s stringent privacy laws and, its covert services have as a consequence often been reluctant to share information. “Although the United Kingdom’s covert services knew about Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist Syed Omar Sheikh’s Islamist links,” one senior intelligence official said, “it told us nothing, leading directly to the hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC-814 and the subsequent murder of the journalist Daniel Pearl. In this case, the same thing could have happened once again. It shows how little has changed.”

Many experts share the same perception. Earlier this week, the head of the international police organisation Interpol lashed out at the U.K.’s terrorism intelligence-sharing procedures. Interpol chief Ronald Noble noted that the U.K. did not share its terrorism suspects’ watch-list — and did not cross-check traveller’s passports with his organisation’s database.

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