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Terrorists kept tabs on airline: Saudis

August 19, 2003

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Suspected terrorists arrested by Saudi officials had shown great interest in British Airways, which suspended flights to the kingdom last week, a Saudi foreign policy adviser said.

"One of the cells that was broken up, there were materials that were - there were maps, there were certain things that indicated that there was a high level of interest in British Airways," Adel al-Jubeir, a foreign policy adviser, told CNN on Sunday.

The airline acted after Saudi authorities discovered a document indicating Saudi militants had been casing Riyadh's King Khalid airport ahead of a possible attack, a US official said in Washington.

Mr al-Jubeir said the Saudi Government had broken up several al-Qaeda cells in recent weeks, with the result that it had gleaned intelligence about what plans might be afoot.

But last week the Saudi Interior Minister, Prince Nayef, said Riyadh had no specific information on a plot to attack aircraft at the airport.

The development came as a research company said Britain had been ranked 10th on a list of countries most likely to be targeted by terrorists in the next 12 months, and that another September 11-style attack was highly likely in the US.

The London-based World Markets Research Centre ranked Colombia, Israel, Pakistan, the US and the Philippines, in descending order, as the five countries most at risk in the next 12 months, Guy Dunn, author of the company's world terrorism index, said on Sunday.

The goal of the index, published yesterday, is to assess the risk of terrorism in 186 countries and, crucially, "against those countries' interests abroad over the next 12 months", Mr Dunn said.

Five criteria were used: motivation of terrorists, the presence of terrorist groups, the scale and frequency of past attacks, efficacy of the groups in carrying out attacks, and prevention - how many attacks have been thwarted by the country.

"Another September 11-style terrorist attack in the United States is highly likely," the report said.

"Networks of militant Islamist groups are less extensive in the US than they are in western Europe, but US-led military action in Afghanistan and Iraq has exacerbated anti-US sentiment."

Coinciding with the report's findings, another tape has been aired on Arabic television from an al-Qaeda spokesman saying Osama bin Laden is alive.

The speaker, who the Al Arabiya network believes is the Afghan-based Abdel Rahman al-Najdi, also urged Iraqis to continue their jihad against the US troops occupying their country.

"I would like to bring the good tidings to Muslims everywhere that Sheik Osama bin Laden is well, very well and that Mullah Omar [the Taliban leader ousted in the 2001 US-led war in Afghanistan] is also alive," the voice on the recording said.

Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, Reuters



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