Britain Bomb Suspects Still Await Charges
Aug. 20, 2006 — -- Despite a lack of criminal charges to date in their ongoing investigation into an alleged terrorist plot to set off explosives on planes, U.K. authorities remain certain they are on the right trail, British Home Secretary John Reid said in an exclusive appearance on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."
"The police and the authorities are convinced that there was an alleged plot here," Reid said. "They have intervened, and in the course of the next few days, we'll wait and see what happens in terms of charges."
Reid declined to confirm or deny the particulars of a London Times report that more than half of the 23 suspects held in the foiled bombing plot will soon be charged with terrorist offenses.
Though hesitant to comment on the cases specifics, Britain's top law enforcement official said, "It is, in my view, relatively simple to make quite an effective bomb … so certainly the capacity to do this exists. But it is a constant search by the terrorists to find ways around restrictions, around our surveillance, around our security means, around our airports and other transportation restrictions -- in order to try and defeat our counterterrorism and to inflict the sort of damage that we've seen before."
The alleged plot reportedly involved trying to detonate makeshift bombs made from relatively common materials smuggled onto as many as 10 airplanes flying from Britain to major destinations in the United States.
After allegedly foiling the plot, the United States and Great Britain raised their respective terror alert systems to the highest level. Britain has since lowered that warning, but Reid insists the danger has not passed.
"We moved down from that to the second-highest level," Reid said. "But I made absolutely clear that that means that there is still a high likelihood of an attempted terrorist attack here."
Reid's counterpart in the United States, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, told "This Week" last Sunday, "What helped the British in this case is the ability to be nimble, to be fast, to be flexible, to operate based on fast-moving information. We have to make sure our legal system allows us to do that. It's not like the 20th century where you had time to get warrants."
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