IRAQ: Intelligence shows al-Qaeda has plans to target merchant shipping in a bid to disrupt world trade, Britain's top navy officer said in an interview published yesterday.
"We have got an underlying level of intelligence which shows there is a threat," the Royal Navy's First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Sir Alan West, was quoted as saying by Lloyd's List maritime newspaper.
The Defence Ministry confirmed Admiral West had given the interview, in which he reiterated previous warnings about the threat of an attack on the world's commercial fleets.
"What we've noticed is that al-Qaeda and other organisations have an awareness about maritime trade ... They've realised how important it is for world trade in general," he said.
Since the September 11th attacks on the US, governments and security experts have repeatedly voiced fears about the vulnerability of the shipping industry, which carries more than 90 per cent of the world's traded goods.
The British naval chief said Western governments had intelligence that showed extreme groups viewed ships as iconic targets and had plans to blow them up. "We've seen other plans from intelligence of attacks on merchant shipping," he said.
"I can't give you detail on any of that, clearly, but we are aware that they have plans and they've looked at this," Admiral West was quoted as telling the paper.
The Defence Ministry said the comments related to existing naval intelligence and were not based on new attack-specific reports. "He did not say that there was any new intelligence to suggest an imminent attack," a spokesman said.
The spokesman said the admiral had chosen to talk about the maritime threat because he was visiting a region of the world - Gibraltar - that was heavily reliant on shipping.
Maritime security experts said the comments were significant.
"It's interesting that he said it - he wouldn't have said it unless there had been some quite lengthy process beforehand," Mr Dominick Donald, a senior analyst with London-based Aegis Defence Services said.
Mr Donald speculated the comments had been made to try to correct press coverage given to a speech by a senior British maritime security adviser in Singapore in June in which the terrorist threat to shipping had been mistakenly played down.
He said the admiral's comments were a deliberate reinforcement of what was already in the public domain, including documentation seized from al-Qaeda on the WMD threat in the maritime sphere and ship targeting.
Admiral West said ports and strategic sea lanes such as the Malacca Straits, the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Gibraltar posed the biggest risks.
While the threat is not new, the stark nature of the warning by a senior military figure is likely to throw the spotlight back on the maritime industry and efforts to tighten security.
Al-Qaeda is known to have a maritime arm. In 2002, extremists linked to al-Qaeda attacked a supertanker off Yemen, killing a member of the crew and setting the tanker ablaze. In October 2000, the bombing of the USS Cole killed 17 US navy personnel. - (Reuters)