Pak-based al-Qaeda big threat to UK: spy chief

Pak-based al-Qaeda big threat to UK: spy chief

By By our correspondent LONDON: The British intelligence agency, M15, has warned its government against a big security threat from Pakistan-based al-Qaeda. MI5 Director-General Dame Eliza said Pakistan-based top leadership of al-Qaeda has become a big threat to the UK security, claiming that 1,600 suspected British-born radical Muslim youths were being directly controlled from Pakistan to launch mass murder attacks in Great Britain. This is for the first time that UK has directly named the top leadership of al-Qaeda based in Pakistan, converting British young Muslims into suicide bombers. She claimed that these radical young UK-born Muslims were being used as “foot soldiers” by terrorists based in Pakistan. “The nature and gravity of the threat was deepening, fuelled by the rapid radicalisation of young British Muslims - some still at school, yet prepared to join the ranks of the suicide bombers,” she said, adding, “The country faced a sustained and growing threat that would last a generation”. Although the MI5 chief normally prefers to stay in the background, Dame Eliza followed the precedent of her two predecessors in making the occasional public speech. This was her third since the July 7 bombings in London last year and contained the starkest assessment yet of the dangers facing Britain. The significant Muslim population and the constant flow of British-born Pakistanis visiting their families in Pakistan every year have been cited as providing al-Qaeda with opportunities of converting young people to terrorism. Eliza’s comments came in an address to a discreet audience from the Mile End Group run by Peter Hennessy, Professor of Contemporary British History at Queens Mary, University of London. Both police and security sources have given warnings that Britain has become the No 1 target of al-Qaeda. She timed her stark assessment to coincide with the conviction of Dhiren Barot, who converted to Islam from Hinduism, for plotting car bomb and dirty bomb attacks in London. This is very intriguing that the MI5 chief, chose to go public and warn everybody how radicalisation of Islam by new generation of Muslims, mostly belonging to Pakistan, was posing a serious threat of mass murder and most importantly how the Pakistani soil was being used by these terrorists to put the security of UK in danger. MI5 has identified 200 terrorist networks involving at least 1,600 people, many under the direct control of al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan. “More and more people are moving from passive sympathy towards active terrorism by being radicalised or indoctrinated by friends, families in organised training events here and overseas,” she said. “Young teenagers are being groomed to be suicide bombers.” She said it was clear from “martyrdom” videos that suicide bombers were motivated in part by their interpretation of UK foreign policy to be anti-Muslim, in particular following UK’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eliza’s speech was later published on MI5’s website before its clearance by John Reid, home secretary. The official said she was alarmed by the “scale and speed” of the radicalisation, which security sources later said had intensified since the 7/7 bombings. “It is the youth who are being actively targeted, groomed, radicalised and set on a path that frighteningly quickly could end in their involvement in mass murder of their fellow citizens, or their early death in a suicide attack or on a foreign battlefield,” she said. “My officers and the police are working to contend with some 200 groupings or networks, totalling over 1,600 identified individuals (and there will be many we don’t know) who are actively engaged in plotting or facilitating terrorist acts here and overseas,” she said.