’UK Air Force thwarted terror plot against four cities’
The United Kingdom's aerial warfare force, Royal Air Force (RAF), has prevented premeditated attacks on four British cities, says a report.
The plot was foiled after the RAF heard commercial pilots discussing targets on their radios, according to the Sunday Express.
The report said two foreign pilots, one of whom was flying for an airline on an intelligence service watchlist, were intercepted talking about the plot.
The strikes were being planned in the week after the November 13 Paris terror attacks, where scores of people were killed and hundreds more injured in the French capital.
The pilots, who were unknown to the authorities but believed to be sympathetic to Daesh (ISIL), were using the emergency “Mayday” channel in the belief they were not being monitored.
They coded their language with musical references, often referring to “hits”. The conversation included boasts that a song would “climb up the charts” – a veiled reference to increases in militant recruits once the attacks had been launched.
It is thought the pilots were preparing to smuggle in explosive devices or chemical weapons. The messages were intercepted as they flew from a European airport, thought to be Schiphol, in Amsterdan, to Middle Eastern destinations.
Although the pilots used ‘coded messages’ from the cockpits of their passenger jets, the ‘Arabic’ transcripts were passed to the British spy agency, GCHQ, where intelligence agents established they were talking about attacks on London, Bath, Brighton and Ipswich, the report added.
The uncovering of the plan raised the terror alert in the UK and was one factor which led to Operation Templer, involving 10,000 soldiers being deployed to support police on Britain’s streets.
Now political commentator Raza Nadim says these kinds of reports are media hypes as they “cannot be independently verified.”
Nadim told Press TV on Sunday that even if they are true, they will only lead to more government surveillance and counter-extremism measures to “infringe on our civil liberties and pave the way for more draconian treatment of Muslims in the UK.”
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