Counter Terror Gazette

The following is Philip Baum’s lead editorial and the full contents of the current edition of ASI.

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Zamboanga City: 2010’s Daallo Airlines Moment? By Philip Baum

On 13^thNovember 2009, the world paid scant attention to the arrest of a 35-year old Somali man, Abdi Hassan Abdi, who was the last passenger in line wishing to board a Daallo Airlines flight from Mogadishu to the northern Somali city of Hargeisa, with onward connections to Djibouti and Dubai. In his possession was a syringe with a green liquid inside, a plastic bag containing 600 grams of ammonium nitrate and half a litre of concentrated sulfuric acid in a plastic bottle; allegedly, when they were discovered at security screening (a notably impressive find in my view), the passenger then attempted to pay a bribe in order to be able to continue on his way.  Although the African nation’s authorities recognised that this was innovative, yet potentially effective way, of infiltrating an explosive device onto an aircraft, most of the rest of the world were either oblivious to the occurrence or readily dismissed it as being of little relevance to the global aviation industry.

Some six weeks later, the newswires were burning in the aftermath of Abdulmutallab’s attempt to destroy a Northwest flight en route from Amsterdam to Detroit using a similar device. This was now a significant incident as it impacted a flight operating between The Netherlands and the United States. Underpants were headline news, body scanners the order of the day…

We ignore incidents such as that perpetrated by Abdi Hassan Abdi at our peril. Not only is it offensive to the developing world to downplay incidents that take place in such regions, it is also short-sighted. Indeed, these are the very incidents that we ought to be focussing our attention on as they are the test sites, selected as they do not appear on our radar screens and specifically because we fail to appreciate their consequences. There is a lack of clarity as to whether the Somali attack is actually linked to that of Christmas Day, but it matters little – copycat or coordinated, co-trained or lone wolves, the creative way of concealing IEDs was being demonstrably appreciated by those we are supposed to guard ourselves from.

When reports surface of stowaways managing to clamber into wheel wells for free flights that are likely to end in death by freezing or crushing, we are often intrigued by the human story that pushes someone to takes such extreme steps. On 6 June this year a Romanian actually survived a 97-minute flight from Vienna to London beneath a private B-747! A month later, on 10 July, a Lebanese man was less fortunate and did not survive the journey in a wheel well of a Nas Air flight from Beirut to Riyadh. Whilst both incidents imply human tragedies for the two 20-year old “passengers” involved, we must concentrate on the fact that both airport and airline security measures were being shown to fail. All the investment in screening technologies means little if our restricted zones can be so readily accessed…MORE ONLINE