Terror plot: claims of "bomb kit" find in wood
It's becoming increasingly typical of police operations during the war on terror. Certain Muslims are arrested in a huge blitz of publicity, airlines are thrown into chaos, police and John Reid start telling us how near we came to catastrophe and then...
...weeks pass with claim and counter claim being made and then retracted, whilst the men remain in custody as the police appear to search for evidence to back up their initial action.
The latest new blitz concerns "bomb making equipment" that has been found in a wood near High Wycombe. Although I notice that the police refuse to confirm the significance of what they have found.
This comes on the morning after a flight in the US was grounded after a woman was arrested with "liquids" that later transpired to be water and facial cleanser.A police source told the BBC that the suitcase contained "everything you would need to make an improvised device".
Scotland Yard would not confirm or deny the reports last night, or even disclose whether a suitcase had been found.
It remains to be seen whether the contents of the High Wycombe suitcase will turn up anything more substantial.
I am not a conspiracy nut and have avoided this story for the past few days thinking that more evidence would come out as time went on. However, no evidence has come out so far and all we are being given are more claims of things that "could be used as bomb-making devices". I read recently of a woman who - shock, horror - was allowed to travel with "Vaseline, matches and a screwdriver". If such innocuous objects constitute bomb making equipment then I would have to think that you could arrest anyone and find these everyday household items in their homes.The search follows the arrest last week of 24 people in connection with the alleged plot, which centred on an apparent plan to bring down 10 planes travelling from the UK to the US using liquid explosives contained in soft-drink bottles.
On Wednesday night, a district judge granted police extensions to continue holding 23 of the suspects arrested in London, High Wycombe and Birmingham. One was released without charge last week. A 25th person, arrested on Tuesday by Thames Valley police, was also released without charge.
Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, suggests that we should be sceptical about what we are being told:
Nine days on, nobody has been charged with any crime. For there to be no clear evidence yet on something that was "imminent" and would bring "mass murder on an unbelievable scale" is, to say the least, peculiar. A 24th person, arrested amid much fanfare on Tuesday, was quietly released without charge the following day.None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not have passports. It could be pretty difficult to convince a jury that these individuals were about to go through with suicide bombings, whatever they bragged about on the net.
What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for more than a year - like thousands of other British Muslims.
Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information from people desperate to stop or avert torture. What you don't get is the truth.
It strikes me as extraordinary that it takes a man in Pakistan to tell police of a plot being hatched by men that they have had under surveillance for a full year. Didn't they come across any of this during the year they were watching them?
At the moment the press are dutifully reporting every "terror inducing" claim the police make, in the same breathless tones that they told us of the "chemical weapons vest" found at Forest Gate and of Charles de Menezes' leap across the barriers at Stockwell tube station.
Both turned out to be false. So I will reserve my judgement on the "High Wycombe bomb making suitcase" until someone tells me what "everything you would need to make an improvised device" actually consists of.
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