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echoes
06-30-2007, 12:49
I am glad that I am not traveling to London this 4th. This is despicable!:mad:

Holly
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,287472,00.html

2 Arrested After Car on Fire Rams Glasgow Terminal
Saturday, June 30, 2007

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GLASGOW, Scotland — Two men rammed a flaming sport utility vehicle into the main terminal of Glasgow airport Saturday, crashing into the glass doors at the entrance and sparking a fire, witnesses said. Police said two suspects were arrested.

There were no reports of injuries but the airport — Scotland's largest — was evacuated and all flights suspended, a day after British police thwarted a plot to bomb central London, discovering two cars abandoned with loads of gasoline, gas canisters and nails.

"One has to conclude ... these are linked," Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, former head of Britain's joint intelligence committee, told Sky News. "This is a very young government, and we may yet see further attacks."

Britain's prime minister, Gordon Brown, who took office only Wednesday, was being briefed on developments, Downing Street said.

In Glasgow, the green SUV barreled toward the building shortly after 3 p.m., hitting security barriers before crashing into the glass doors and exploding, witnesses said. Two men jumped out of the burning vehicle, one of them engulfed in flames, they said.

"The car came speeding past at about 30 mph. It was approaching the building quickly," said Scott Leeson, who was nearby at the time. "Then the driver swerved the car around so he could ram straight in to the door. He must have been trying to smash straight through."

Passengers fled running and screaming from the busy terminal, Margaret Hughes told the British Broadcasting Corp. "There was black smoke gushing out where the car had obviously been driven into the airport," she said.

Flames and black smoke rose from the vehicle outside the main entrance. Police said it was unclear if anyone was injured. Other passengers were stranded, with at least one airplane grounded on the runway, the BBC said.

The White House said President Bush was being keep abreast of the events in London and Scotland.

"We're in contact with British authorities on the matter," said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council.

The crash at Glasgow airport comes exactly a week before the second anniversary of the July 7 bombings that killed 52 people.

Leeson said bollards — security posts outside the entrance — stopped the driver from barreling into the bustling terminal at Glasgow's airport.

"He's trying to get through the main door frame but the bollards have stopped him from going through. If he'd got through, he'd have killed hundreds, obviously," he said.

Leeson said only the nose of the vehicle made it inside the building. Richard Grey told the BBC that the vehicle was lodged into the center of the terminal's main entrance.

"The jeep is completely on fire and it exploded not long after. It exploded at the entrance to the terminal," witness Stephen Clarkson told the BBC. "It may have been an explosion of petrol in the tank because it was not a massive explosion."

Two men — one of them engulfed in flames — were in the SUV, witnesses told BBC News executive Helen Boaden, who was at the airport at time. She described the men as South Asian.

Clarkson described him as a large South Asian man. "His whole body was on fire.... He was just talking gibberish," he told the BBC.

"An Asian guy had been pulled out of the car by two police officers he was trying to fight off and they'd got him on the floor," Grey told the BBC.

Boaden said police "wrestled him to the ground — the fire was burning through his clothes — and finally put him out with a fire extinguisher."

Lesson said an airport officials did not think the incident was an accident.

"He said the men in the car got out and started throwing petrol about — that must be how it caught fire," he said.

Another witness, Fiona Tracey, described a "bang" coming from the SUV. The vehicle was on fire and "every now and again there was a bang coming off it. ... There was definitely a bang," she told Sky News television.

Grey said the car did not explode. "There were a few pops and bangs that seemed to be the tires and the petrol."

nmap
06-30-2007, 14:22
I agree, Echoes; it is, without question, despicable.

It's also heartening that the bad guys continue to be ineffective.

So - have they been activated as a diversion? Were they unprepared, but the order came down?

Or - is this a hint of new tactics, and hence something that will persist for a time.

Iran has instituted gasoline rationing...Gaza has gone to Hamas...Hezbollah seems restive...and there are multiple terrorist attacks in the UK. Connection, or just me with too much time on my hands?

Mosby Raider
06-30-2007, 15:49
It's being reported now that there have been a total of three arrests, with no additional details as to the third arrestee.

hoot72
07-01-2007, 02:58
One of these days these wankers are going to get it right and people are going to get killed; the UK has a big big problem with kicking out alot of these fanatics due to human rights violations and a strong leftist movement.

If a UK citizen is caught planning or involved in any form of terrorism, isnt that also considered treason? Cant he be stripped of his citizenship and kicked out?

Or is that only punishable by jail-time?

Gypsy
07-01-2007, 09:45
It's being reported now that there have been a total of three arrests, with no additional details as to the third arrestee.


Looks like they're up to five arrests...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070701/ap_on_re_eu/britain_terrorism

U.K. police make 5th terror arrest
By IAN STEWART, Associated Press Writer
31 minutes ago



GLASGOW, Scotland - Police searched several houses near Glasgow's airport and made a fifth arrest Sunday in connection with a fiery attack on its main terminal and foiled car bombings in London, which the prime minister suggested were carried out by terrorists linked to al-Qaida.

The terrorist threat that Britain faces is "long-term and sustained," Prime Minister Gordon Brown said in a nationally televised interview. It is clear, he said, "that we are dealing, in general terms, with people who are associated with al-Qaida."

After meeting with the country's top intelligence officers, police and senior officials, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said Britain would not be cowed.

"We won't, as the British people, be intimidated or let anyone stop us getting on with our lives," Smith said.

On Friday, police thwarted an apparent plot to set off a coordinated bomb attack in central London when an ambulance crew outside a nightclub spotted smoke coming from a Mercedes found rigged with explosives. They found a second Mercedes filled with explosives hours later.

And on Saturday, two men rammed a flaming Jeep into the main entrance of Glasgow airport, shattering the glass doors and igniting a fire just yards from people lined up at check-in counters.

"Al-Qaida has imported the tactics of Baghdad and Bali to the streets of the UK," said Lord Stevens, Brown's terrorism adviser.

The two men from the Glasgow attack were in police custody Sunday, one of them under guard in the hospital after being engulfed in flames when the Jeep crashed into the airport.

Early Sunday, police arrested two people — a 26-year-old man and a 27-year-old woman — on a major highway in Cheshire, northern England, in a joint swoop by officers from London and Birmingham, Scotland Yard said in London. A fifth suspect was arrested in Liverpool, police there said.

Police said officers were searching a residential area about a mile from the airport. In Houston, a small town just outside Glasgow, police cordoned off the area around a two-story house to search it.

The two attacks clearly are linked, police and security officials said, noting that all three vehicles contained flammable materials — including gasoline and gas cylinders.

Britain on Saturday raised its terror alert to "critical" — the highest possible level — and the Bush administration announced plans to increase security at airports and on mass transit.

The new terror threat presents Brown with an enormous challenge early in his premiership — and comes at a time of already heightened vigilance one week before the anniversary of the July 7, 2005, London transit attacks. Those were largely carried out by local Muslims, exacerbating ethnic tensions in Britain.

Kenny MacAskill, Scotland's justice secretary, said the two Glasgow attackers were not "born and bred here."

"Any suggestion to be made that they are homegrown terrorists is not true," he said.

Brown, a Scot who replaced Tony Blair as prime minister just days earlier, urged Britons to remain "constantly vigilant" about security. He said "Everything is being done in our power ... to protect people's lives."

"We will not yield, we will not be intimidated, and we will not allow anyone to undermine our British way of life," he told the British Broadcasting Corp. in a TV interview.

Lord Stevens, London's former police chief, called it a major escalation in the campaign waged by Islamic militants.

In a column in Sunday's News of the World newspaper, he wrote that the terrorists are using "the same technology, the same bomb-making techniques, the same operating methods as their brothers-in-arms in both Baghdad and Bali," referring to the 2002 and 2005 attacks on the Indonesian resort island that killed more than 200 people.

Glasgow police chief Willie Rae said a suspicious device was found on a man wrestled to the ground by officers at Glasgow airport and hospitalized in critical condition with severe burns.

John Smeaton, who saw the attack, said the man shouted "Allah, Allah" as he was detained.

Glasgow airport began reopening Sunday, although the airport operator warned many flights would be canceled. The crashed Jeep remained out front, covered in a blue tarpaulin, and cars were not allowed to drive up to the terminal.

Officers also were reviewing closed-circuit television footage in the search for clues into the foiled London bombings.

The incident hinted of a foiled December 1999 plot to attack Los Angeles International Airport. Customs agents stopped a man in a car packed with 124 pounds of explosives. He is serving a 22-year prison sentence for the plot.

And last year, a 35-year-old British convert to Islam was convicted of plotting to bomb several U.S. financial targets and luxury London hotels with a plot that called for using limousines packed with gas tanks, napalm and nails.

In April, accused members of an al-Qaida-linked terror cell were convicted of conspiring to blow up the Ministry of Sound nightclub, one of London's biggest music venues.

Ret10Echo
08-03-2007, 12:34
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/03/nbomber103.xml



Glasgow airport terror suspect dies
By Kate Devlin
Last Updated: 1:11pm BST 03/08/2007



One of the men suspected of the Glasgow airport car bomb attack has died in hospital.


Kafeel Ahmed suffered 90 per cent burns
Kafeel Ahmed, 27, was alleged to be the driver of the jeep which burst into flames as it smashed, laden with gas canisters, into the airport's main terminal on June 30.

He suffered 90 per cent burns across much of his body after he doused himself and the vehicle in petrol and set it alight.

He was one of two men detained following the attack, which came a day after similar car bombs failed to explode in central London