Inconvenience and delays the price to pay for safe air travel

Published on Sunday 27 December 2009 20:42

INTELLIGENCE agencies across the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Africa face difficult questions following the chilling in-flight attempt to blow up an airliner. As if to remind us that there can be no relaxation in our vigilance against Muslim extremists, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab targeted a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam as it approached Detroit on Friday. He is said to have had the high explosive pentaerythritol moulded to his body and sewn into his underpants.

He then tried to detonate the device using a syringe, but the explosives failed to go off. Swift and courageous action by passengers helped to ensure that there was not an appalling disaster with multiple loss of life.

For millions of airline passengers, the immediate impact will be tighter security at airports and greater rigour in the security and inspection process. Passengers face a strict regime of one item of hand luggage only, a body "pat-down" as they go through security, restrictions on the use of in-flight toilets and access to hand luggage when planes are preparing for landing. Already there are reports of long delays at airports and these may lengthen after the holiday run.

The vast majority of passengers accept the need for such precautions and will submit to the tighter regime. But it adds yet another tier of worry and delay to an already fraught process of air travel. Now we are all having to learn what it is like to fly El Al, the Israeli airline that has lived for decades with the daily threat of terrorism.

For the intelligence forces, the headache is considerable. How did Abdulmutallab, who was understood to be known to the US and UK security authorities, enter and depart the UK at will, and possess a valid visa to travel to the US and board a plane with explosive material on his person?

It is not as if this is the first time that transatlantic flight has been so imperilled. Airliners have long been a favoured target for al-Qaeda. This latest attack bears similarities to the attempt by British national Richard Reid – the so-called "shoe-bomber" – who tried and failed to ignite his device in December 2001. After 9/11, airline cockpits were hardened and there was a huge expansion of checks on passengers. In 2006, a group of young British men linked to al-Qaeda planned to use liquid explosives to bring down multiple planes but were apprehended.

The pressing question for the security forces is how to distinguish, if this is possible, those determined to commit a terrorist act from those many placed on a terrorist "watch-list". Abdulmutallab, an engineering student at University College, London, was already known to the UK authorities. Indeed, his father is understood to have expressed concern over his son's radicalisation by Muslim extremists in Togo. The suspect is believed to have been denied a new visa this summer by the UK Border Agency after attempting to apply for a course at a bogus college.

This attempt to blow up a civilian airliner means yet further surveillance and data swapping: the price we must pay in keeping our skies safe from terrorists.