Terror concerns ground flights

SIX US-bound flights from England, Scotland and France have been cancelled because of security concerns.

The US Government said it had fresh indications of al-Qaida’s continued interest in targeting commercial planes flying to the US.

US officials have been concerned for some time that al-Qaida wants to use chemical, biological or radiological weapons aboard an airplane. However, the threat information that led to the cancelled flights this weekend did not indicate a specific method to bring down a plane or spread an illness such as smallpox, said a US official speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Instead, the official said intelligence analysts use threat information about the flights, and marry it up to information about types of attacks al-Qaida may want to launch, to come up with possible scenarios for an attack at any particular time.

British Airways grounded the same flight scheduled yesterday and today from London’s Heathrow Airport to Dulles International Airport outside Washington, as well as the return flights. Also cancelled was a flight from London to Miami yesterday. In addition, Continental Airlines said it cancelled Flight 17 from Glasgow, Scotland, to Los Angeles with an intermediate stop in Newark, NJ.

Air France scrubbed the same flight set for yesterday and today from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris to Dulles. As a result, the outbound flights were cancelled.

A US Government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said there were concerns about a handful of flights on those foreign carriers and a US-based airline that flies internationally. The official declined to identify the third carrier, which turned out to be Continental.

“We continue to receive threat reporting that indicates al-Qaida’s desire to target international aviation,” said Brian Roehrkasse, spokesman for the Homeland Security Department.

Despite those threats, he said the department had no plans to raise the terror alert level from yellow, or elevated risk of terrorist attack