Missiles major terror threat to airliners

Missiles major terror threat to airliners

Lawrence Bartlett, Agence France-Presse, Kuala Lumpur

The missile attack on a civilian airliner in Kenya may have failed but it represents a grave new threat in global terrorism, analysts said on Friday, warning governments to take urgent action to prevent a disaster.

They pointed out that if the Kenyan missile attack had been successful, the death toll would almost certainly have been higher than that in the horrific Bali bombing in Indonesia last month which killed more than 190 people.

"The use of surface-to-air missiles is very disquieting because if you can bring down an aircraft you guarantee you will kill everyone on board," said Andrew Tan, security analyst with Singapore's Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies.

There were 261 passengers on the charter plane of Israel's Arkia airlines which was targeted as it took off from Mombasa in Kenya on Thursday. A nearly simultaneous suicide car bomb attack on a Mombasa hotel killed 12 people.

With Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terror network a prime suspect in the Kenya attack and already linked to the Bali blast, the chance of more missile attacks is high, particularly in Southeast Asia, says terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna.

"Civil aviation in this part of the world must be extremely cautious because it is a question of time that they will bring the missiles to this region," he told AFP.

"Governments here must start now to develop the counter measures for civil aviation, they must not wait until an aircraft is hit."

Singapore-based Gunaratna, author of Inside al-Qaeda, said such measures could include decoy technologies used by military aircraft and the widening of security perimeters around airports as planes were most vulnerable at take off and landing.

But aviation experts have said the missile attack was the kind of nightmare the industry has long feared and that it was difficult to defend against anywhere in the world.

"Planes can be armed with flares that can fired so that the missile follows the flare rather than the aircraft, but the missiles are pretty sophisticated," said Kieran Daly, editor of Air Transport Intelligence.

"This kind of attack can only be countered by law enforcement. There is little that the aviation industry can do."

Simple shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles have been mass produced for years and are widely available in Afghanistan, former Soviet Union countries and Lebanon. U.S. forces in Afghanistan have reportedly seized nearly 6,000 missiles there this year.

Most missiles can only reach planes at altitudes of up to 10,000feet and would be most effective within a few minutes of take-off or as an airliner came in to land, but they could be fired up to a few miles (kilometers) from an airport perimeter.

Analysts suspect that the Kenya attack is another example of al-Qaeda's shift towards soft targets and was in line with a recent videotaped warning by bin Laden.

Gunaratna said he was convinced that al-Qaeda was behind the Mombasa attack and linked to the Bali blast through the Southeast Asian Jamaah Islamiyah (JI) network, and predicted more such atrocities, particularly in developing countries where security was lax.

Governments around the world have so far stopped short of pinning the blame for the Mombasa attack on al-Qaeda, but the British government clearly linked it to the Bali blast.

"Following this and other recent developments, including the terrorist bombing of a nightclub in Bali on Oct. 12, UK nationals worldwide should be aware of indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets in public places, including tourist sites," the Foreign Office said.