US, EU face spectre of Mumbai-style attack

US: A possible terror plot against European cities has confirmed longstanding fears among Western security services that Al-Qaeda and its allies could try to recreate the 2008 onslaught on Mumbai.

European and US security officials, citing recent intelligence, say that Al-Qaeda may be planning Mumbai-style attacks with heavily-armed gunmen, a tactic that inflicts mass carnage and terror without the risks associated with bomb-making.

“Compared to trying to smuggle explosives on to an airplane, this is much easier.

You just drive to the target, get out and start acting,” Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer, told AFP.

“It’s a relatively simple idea. You get a handful of terrorists willing to commit mass murder and suicide and let them loose in an urban environment,” said Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has advised President Barack Obama.

In the Mumbai assault, ten militants from Al-Qaeda-linked Lashkar-e-Taiba mowed down unarmed civilians at targets across the Indian city after arriving by boat from Karachi, leaving 166 dead.

Inspired by the effect of Mumbai, Al-Qaeda came close to pulling off a similar attack in Denmark last year, targeting the offices of the newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which had run controversial cartoons several years ago of the Prophet Mohammed.

Details of the plan emerged in the trial of David Headley, an American of Paksitani descent, who pleaded guilty to casing targets in Mumbai for Lashkar-e-Taiba.

In the Danish attack plan, Headley told prosecutors he pretended to be interested in buying ads in so he could carry out reconnaissance of the newspaper’s Copenhagen offices. He was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare airport last year as he was on his way to deliver 13 surveillance videos for the Danish plot.

“I think there’s prima facie evidence in the Copenhagen affair, that Al-Qaeda operatives are seriously considering the Mumbai exemplar as one they would like to reproduce,” Riedel said.

Militants planned to enter the newspaper’s office, murder the staff and then wage a fight to the death with Danish police. Experts said would-be attackers would have some difficulty securing assault rifles in Europe, unlike South Asia or the United States where guns are more readily available.

Well-trained European special police squads also would likely be able to contain such an attack much faster than in Mumbai, where Indian police faced accusations of a slow response. But even so, the effect would still be horrific, experts said.

“Mumbai showed that the use of firearms lowers the barrier of entry for a terrorist attack,” Gabriel Koehler-Derrick of the Combating Terrorism Center at the US military academy at West Point, New York.

In a shooting rampage at Fort Hood in Texas last year, police arrived quickly and stopped the lone gunman within minutes.

“It went as well as it can be expected in a case like this. And nevertheless, 13 people were killed and many wounded,” Koehler-Derrick said.

American police were trained for such events, but not for a larger-scale assault similar to Mumbai involving teams of gunman with more elaborate plans, he added. Any attack against European cities and the United States will likely rely on militants with Western passports, who can more easily avoid detection thanks to a “clean skin,” while reinforcing Al-Qaeda propaganda about a global struggle.

The mounting threat posed by “Western foreign fighters” has haunted security services since the attacks of September 11, 2001, and authorities have struggled to track suspects travelling to Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia to forge terror links.

According to Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, some 200 Germans or foreigners living in Germany have spent time in Pakistan in a bid to undergo paramilitary training by Islamist groups. Authorities have concrete evidence that 65 of them underwent such training, it said.

“In Germany, reporting about German citizens who have gone to Afghanistan to work with the Taliban has really become quite disturbing,” Riedel said.

Washington, Tuesday. AFP