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2 Asian ports still open to
terror By Alan Boyd
SYDNEY - Cracks have emerged in the
security shield being erected around Asian deepsea
ports as evidence emerges that extremist
organizations may be planning terrorist attacks on
terminals and exposed container ships.
Five years of overhauling lax security
have equipped only a small number of ports to
detect potential threats, with the majority
failing to enforce even rudimentary background
checks on
personnel or limit access to
terminal facilities.
The authoritative
Israeli-based Institute for Counter-Terrorism
(ICT) has warned that al-Qaeda has a real
capability of attacking maritime targets in Asia
and identified ports as their soft underbelly.
"They appear to have stayed at least one
step ahead of the security services invoked thus
far by modifying their recruitment and the
organizational structure," noted researcher Akiva
Lorenz. "It is only a matter of time until
al-Qaeda once more will succeed in attacking the
West. Maritime terrorism is positioned to be their
method of choice."
Jemaah Islamiyah and
the Abu Sayyaf Group, two Southeast Asian
terrorist groups with close links to al-Qaeda, are
known to have developed maritime capabilities, as
has Sri Lanka's Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
Much of the expertise acquired by Abu
Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah is believed to have
been passed on by al-Qaeda's maritime-operations
commander Abdul al-Rahim al-Nashiri before his
capture in Aden in November 2002.
Nashiri
conceived the idea of using small craft packed
with explosives to target US warships and was the
mastermind of a suicide attack on the USS Cole in
Aden in October 2000 that killed 17 American
servicemen and injured another 37.
The
attack on the Cole, which was berthed in port
while refueling, showed that vessels are largely
defenseless to this type of threat, while
intelligence services discovered they were facing
an increasingly dispersed enemy.
Devised
at a safe house in Aden, the raid involved two
operatives from Saudi Arabia who were briefed in
Pakistan and given their final orders in Bangkok,
where they also reportedly received about
US$36,000 in financing.
Osama bin Laden
would later commemorate the bombing of the USS
Cole with a morbid poem at his son's wedding:
A destroyer: even the brave fear its might.
It inspires horror in the harbor and in the
open sea. She sails into the waves Flanked
by arrogance, haughtiness and false power. To
her doom she moves slowly A dinghy awaits her,
riding the waves.
In the subsequent
two years before his capture, Nashiri drew up
plans to launch small boats against US warships in
the Strait of Hormuz after he was deterred by
increased security in other busy shipping lanes
such as off Aden and Gibraltar.
"According
to his interrogation, al-Nashiri planned to attack
US navy ships with several speedboats launched
from a mother vessel traveling on one of two
1-nautical-mile-wide channels," Lorenz reported.
"The plan was to detonate the mother
vessel once it passed any possible target. After a
final intelligence review, al-Nashiri deemed the
success of such a mission was unlikely and aborted
its operation."
Al-Qaeda later modified
its strategy to use less direct attacks, with
divers trained to plant explosives on the hulls of
ships or ram them with swimmer delivery vehicles
that had been turned into floating bombs.
Another strategy had terrorists hijacking
vessels for ransom or steering ships laden with
bombs into specific targets in much the same
manner as the airliners that were used to attack
buildings in the US on September 11, 2001.
One month before Nashiri's arrest, a small
boat loaded with explosives was rammed into MV
Limburg, a large crude-oil carrier being leased by
state-owned Petronas of Malaysia, in a suicide
attack in open seas outside Aden.
There is
evidence that Nashiri's strategy has been retained
for future operations, possibly with the help of
Asian terrorist organizations.
In 2005, an
Abu Sayyaf member, Angelo Gamal Baharan, was
apprehended after undergoing scuba-diving training
at Palwan, Philippines, for what he said was a
planned operation in an unidentified country.
According to the ICT, the US Federal
Bureau of Investigation had already reacted to the
threat of underwater attacks by securing
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