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British Police Foil Alleged Mall Massacre Copycat Plot
An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post reports, "British law enforcement agencies averted a plot to orchestrate a large-scale terror attack similar to the assault on Kenya's Westgate mall, an official said Monday. Police were questioning four men in their 20s on suspicion of terrorism after they were detained Sunday in pre-planned, intelligence-led raids. A British security official said the men were planning a shooting spree akin to the Westgate attack in Nairobi, in which at least 67 people died. ... in a series of statements, the force said the men were all British nationals between the ages of 25 and 29, with roots in Turkey, Pakistan, Algeria and Azerbaijan. ... the London police firearms unit took part in the arrests. British police rarely carry weapons and their involvement suggested concern that men might have been armed." — The Sydney Morning Herald has video. Prime Minister Cameron recently expressed concern regarding such a possibility."
Fake.
Just like the "terrorists" the FBI keeps "catching".
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Really, it is.
Because of course they uncovered this by spying on citizens, so they really should be able to keep spying on everyone.
Just think of the malls.
This was a somewhat more exciting series of arrests than usual.
Police shoot at car in suspected terror raids
Armed police shot at the tyres of a car to stop two suspected terrorists during a dramatic series of raids to foil an alleged plot to attack the UK.
Officers fired special Hatton rounds – large shotgun ammunition designed to burst tyres or breach doors – to force the vehicle over in east London on Sunday evening. Witnesses also reported seeing police ram the back of the car before it was finally brought to a halt while a helicopter hovered overhead. In simultaneous arrests, armed officers swooped on a man in the street in west London while a fourth man was arrested at a flat south east of the city. A large number of armed officers were used because it was feared the men had access to weapons and were planning a suspected Islamist terror attack, the Daily Telegraph understands.
The head of MI5 is concerned about the diminishing margin of advantage they have to detect such things in the face of a continuing threat.
Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute in London, Mr Parker pointed out the statistics of the threat from terrorism faced by the UK. The “plain facts”, he said, were that “from 11 September 2001 to the end of March this year, 330 people were convicted of terrorism related- offences in Britain In the first few months of this year, there were four major trials related to terrorist plots. Since 2000, we have seen serious major acts of terrorism in this country typically once or twice a year.”
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I suspect they would have a lot less problem with terrorists and ne'er-do-wells.
Nope, there'd simply be a lot more people getting shot.
Summation 2
Between Cameron's insistence upon an approach that sounds an awful lot like a police state and the fact that this attack was "not imminent," you'll have to pardon me for speculating that this is a new episode of the hit sitcom "Security Theatre." After the pilot episode "TSA at the Airport," they've moved through a few seasons of bland, uninspired episodes, followed by their made-for-TV movie "PRISM" and now what appears to have been an action-packed feature film, "These Guys Might Have Roots in the Middle East: Save the Mall!"
I think I'll watch a new series. This one jumped the shark long ago.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
There is no UK law preventing an individual from wearing bear arms.
One thing I'm actually rather impressed with. Rather than running around with guns all the time, apparently the BP have a special unit to deal with cases where they're warranted. Certainly it's a different culture than N. America in that regard.
This story keeps on growing. In the British press this morning it was claimed that the men fought in Syria and that they have access to weapons in the UK. That was it.
Now the international press reports that the men were planning an atrocity.
However, the police have found no guns or, in fact, any evidence of any crime. They would certainly be crowing about it if they had.
This is such a non-story the BBC aren't bothering to report it.
No, the reason these chaps get caught so easily in the UK is because it's pretty much impossible to get your hands on a gun, let alone an assault rifle and enough ammo to carry out something like this.
If anyone wanted to do this in the US, their steps would involve "getting a gun" and "shooting people". Neither of which is a particularly challenging task and, in case you've not been watching the news recently, is something so simple that children can do it, and they frequently do.
"Humm, guns keep killing people and every time we add more guns nothing changes. Hey how about more guns? Awesome lets try that"
Really for most of my lifetime the terrorist problem in the United Kingdom was expatiated by the U.S.A. harbouring convicted terrorists and refusing to extradite them back to the U.K. while all the time allowing said terrorist groups to raise money. In that respect 9/11 was a huge boon because all of a sudden the U.S.A. realized that it could no longer support such terrorist activities.
Nope, there'd simply be a lot more people getting shot.
That is very, very true. In US and Canada there is a perception that if police has guns, they only use it as a last resort. In many cases that is not that case.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/another-fatal-shooting-on-an-empty-toronto-bus-16-years-earlier/article13494159/
I think you'd find that the ones who deserve it are mostly the ones with the guns. Everyone else is too busy thinking about getting on with their life to consider violent crime.
which is totally what she said
BRITAIN DID TO KENYA ... terrify prisoners ... ‘maul’ them... Abu Ghraib ... various indignities .... sodomise one another ...
What relevance does any of that have to either this incident? What relevance does it have to the terrorist attack at Westgate mall last month that these suspects apparently hoped to recreate?
That axe of yours must be getting might sharp with all the grinding.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
No, firearms are not illegal in the UK - that's a common misconception.. Some specific types of firearms are illegal (e.g. handguns), the rest require the owner to hold a firearms licence.
the lazarus corporation
The point of conducting investigations and arrests is to prevent an attack. Experience shows that doing police work that way results in many fewer people having their civil rights violated by high velocity lead pellets or bomb fragments which render them dead. So, something did in fact happen: investigation showed a plot in the works and arrests were made.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Clearly you have more confidence in the veracity of what we are told by governments than I do.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Quite.
It's a big mistake to think that the British police are unarmed. They're not.
They just don't bother with piddling little pistols.
If you're going to have a gun, have a BIG GUN.
Other than for plain-clothed detectives working undercover, pistols are pretty much laughed at by the British police. Compare the stopping power of a weeny little Colt or a Glock to that of an MP5 sub-machine gun, G36 assault rifle or (God help you if you see one of these - strongly suggest you change your plans for that day) an SA-80 or AR-15 assault rifle.
Although British police don't routinely carry sidearms, in high crime urban areas they will carry SMGs or assault rifles in a locked gun cabinet in the boot (trunk) of their car. In extremely difficult or vulnerable areas such as airports or tourist hotspots, they will carry MP5s around, mixing in with the crowd. The bobbies carrying MP5s are very nice blokes, feel free to strike up a conversation with them. Just back off the ones carrying SA-80s and AR-15s, there's a good chap.
Our largest island is only 700 miles long. Where on earth are you going to run to, that a radioed-ahead armed response unit can't get to first?
I can fully understand why lots of larger countries have routinely armed police - calling for backup could take hours. But it's extremely difficult to outrun the police radio on an island only 700 miles long with a heavily-armed SMG & assault rifle unit every 25 miles or so, and CCTV at every trunk road junction (interstate intersection).
(The police at Birmingham Airport used to have those truly lovely-looking P90 bullpup rifles for manoeuvrability in corridors & aeroplanes; from my recent visit it looks like they've swapped over to MP5s - a shame as the bullpups just looked like a wonderfully practical bit of design. I once saw West Midlands Police using one of those wacky Steyr Augs - again, lovely design - but seem to have standardised now on SA-80s and AR-15s. There seems to be a lot more standardisation across the various regional firearms units these days. Probably very practical from a co-ordinated response point of view, but a lot less showy from a nerd point of view.)
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Good call. We have hundreds of millions of guns here in the US and we have the lowest incarceration costs in the world... oh wait.
Well at least we never have armed gunmen attack public forums... crap, that's not quite it either.
USAian approach to fighting terrorism: Let's have a trillion dollar war on some random country. That'll show em. Nobody will mess with us afterwards. Oh, and let's spend a fortune in tax dollars on an elaborate security theatre in all airports so that we turn air travel into an ordeal. Let's also hire goons to intimidate anyone who wants to enter the country as a tourist, especially if their skin is dark or if there's any stamps in their passports that show they've been to muslim countries. And let's spend more than then next half dozen countries combined on super-duper high tech weapons even if our own armed forces are telling us they don't want them.
British approach to fighting terrorism: Keep plugging away behind the scenes. Use the intelligence agencies to infiltrate terror groups and arrest them before they can strike. Keep it discreet, keep it quiet, and don't announce anything publicly until there's been an arrest. Meanwhile, let life go on as normal, keep going to work, keep on flying, keep shopping in busy streets, keep commuting on crowded trains and buses, and on no account do we change our way of life in search of an impossible-to-obtain standard of security because to do so would be to let the terrorists win.
I wonder which one is more effective.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
" Keep plugging away behind the scenes. Use the intelligence agencies to infiltrate terror groups and arrest them before they can strike. Keep it discreet, keep it quiet, and don't announce anything publicly until there's been an arrest."
Oh, and you were doing so well right up to this point. Despite all the saber rattling the US does, the underpinning of the entire country's response is, infact, intelligence. Up until Snowden, we did keep it all quiet and discreet. Thing is, nobody actually seems to be in favor of that anymore either.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
But honestly, your guns and your prison pollination have little to do with eachother. Your prisons are full because you have a very successful and profitable prison industry, and they are filled with people who were caught with a few grams of marijuana on them, not robbers, and killers.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Only flaw: Your statement is not in line with observable reality. Fundamentalists have no tolerance for anybody that thinks differently (including members of the same religion) and are easily incited to kill, maim and slaughter everybody perceived by them to be "different". That is the problem with religion: Depending on infection degree (meme infection), intellectual capabilities, empathy and common decency get suspended and replaced by easy recipes that often involve strong forms of aggression.
And no, I am not intellectually lazy, rather you did not understand what I wrote. Pretty impressive, given how short it was.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
prison pollination
Is this another new euphemism?
Dubious; there are 3 possibilities, 1 it was almost entirely sponsored and encouraged by the security service and the losers who were arrested were just that losers. 2 that they are real attackers who might have pulled something nasty off. or 3 that this is a huge disproportionate response to what, in reality, were just some angry guys drunk talking.
A simple example would be that I know 2 guys who have long been planning the perfect kidnapping. Not that they ever would kidnap anyone it is just a thought experiment in that doing the exchange would be fantastically difficult. But if you were to have a wiretap of any of their conversations you would think that they were two sociopathic nasties just days away from the snatching someone. Seeing that they have been having the same discussion for over 20 years it might be the slowest conspiracy in history. Seeing that the context of the conversation was set 20 years ago then any conversation since does not need to begin with "hypothetically" if anything their conversations would be something more along the lines of the exacting details of the use of helicopters, spaceships, submarines or whatever has recently popped into either of their heads. The worst is that if someone from a security service were to join into their debate(with the goal of an arrest) they would probably even accept the use of say a helicopter or whatever to stage some scenario that they were debating. But again neither of these two would ever even think about actually doing a crime so horrible. But a series of recordings played to the jury would be pretty damning.