London, Jan. 24: The British terror alert, which was upgraded from "substantial" to "severe" on Friday, has now been linked to an Al Qaeda hijack plot in India, women bombers and the upcoming Yemen conference in London.
British home secretary Alan Johnson had on Friday refused to ascribe any reason for upgrading the terror threat to "severe" lowering it to "substantial" in July 2009. "This means that a terrorist attack is highly likely, but I should stress that there is no intelligence to suggest that an attack is imminent," Mr Johnson said.
However, the Sunday Times has linked the heightened terror alert in Britain to a plot by Al Qaeda-linked terrorists in Pakistan to hijack an Air India flight from Mumbai or New Delhi. There was no specific link to Britain, but UK intelligence agencies fear that terrorists could hijack an Indian passenger jet and crash it into a British city, the report added.
The warning about the hijack plot was sent in a detailed "threat assessment" to MI5 by India’s Intelligence Bureau.
A group of female terrorists of "non-Arab" appearance have, according to the Sunday Telegraph, been trained to attack Western targets as suicide bombers. The report said the warning about female bombers came from the US. "They have trained women. There are others who are still out there who have been trained and who are clean skins — that means people who we do not have a record of, people who may not look like Al Qaeda terrorists, who may not be Arabs, and may not be men," the Daily Telegraph quoted Richard Clarke, a former chief White House counter-terrorism adviser, as saying.
At least two of these female bombers are believed to be connected to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which dispatched Nigerian Abdulmutallab to blow up a Delta Airlines plane.
The link to the Yemen and Afghanistan conferences, being held in London this week, was made in a report by the Independent on Sunday.
This report quoted Whitehall sources as saying that intelligence agencies had suggested that this week’s London conferences on Yemen and Afghanistan could be used by Al Qaeda as an opportunity to strike at the West. "The conferences in London on Afghanistan and Yemen provide a focus for Al Qaeda to do something against British and US interests. It could be a US airliner leaving the UK, or US interests in the UK, or US interests abroad," the report quoted an unnamed Whitehall source as saying.
British foreign secretary David Miliband told BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday that it would be "very stupid" of him to comment on the intelligence behind the change in the threat level. "The fact is these people will stop at nothing. They will try every trick in the book. They will use advanced technology. They will use all the mechanisms of an open society that we depend on for their own terrible purposes, and they will try and strike at Christians, Muslims, Jews randomly," he said.
Age Correspondent