Israel Matzav

Maybe they should run their employees through those full body scanners

I've mentioned many times on this blog my July 2003 conversation with an El Al security person at London's Heathrow Airport, who told me that since Heathrow employees were involved in a suicide bombing at Mike's Place in Tel Aviv in April 2003, El Al no longer trusts Heathrow security. Apparently, the Mike's place bombers were not an isolated incident.

Then, last week, a second British Airways employee who was apparently part of the same plot was taken into police custody. This man worked at Heathrow Airport — one of the busiest international airports in the world. “No specific target has emerged but the airport link is obviously on our minds,” a security official told the Sun. But more arrests may be coming, the official added.

This second man, whose name has not been released, is not the first jihadist to work at an airport. Jawad Akbar, one of the five men convicted in 2007 of plotting to blow up the Ministry of Sound nightclub with fertilizer bombs, worked part-time at Gatwick Airport and had a security clearance “for working airside.” One of the members of the cell that planned August 2006 London plane bombing plot worked at Heathrow Airport with an all-area access pass.

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Then there is convicted al-Qaeda member Dhiren Barot, who worked for Air Malta in its central London office from 1991-1995. Barot appealed to the air carrier to transfer him to the company’s Heathrow Airport office, but his transfer application was turned down. During his trial, Scotland Yard called Barot a “determined and experienced terrorist,” whose plans included setting off a dirty bomb in London and detonating a bomb under the Thames River in order to flood the subways system and drown thousands of commuters. Whether or not Barot had plans to attack an airline is unknown; evidence as such never materialized during the trial.

In February, the British government announced that it was installing full body scanners at Heathrow and Manchester, and later at all British airports. The rule is that if you're picked for the scanner and refuse, you can't fly. Just a week later, Heathrow employees passed around nude pictures of an actor taken from the scanner. Perhaps it's not the passengers who need to go through the full body scanner, but the British airports' employees. Daily.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:28 PM