Military defends rooftop missile plan for Olympics

British military chiefs defended plans to put missile batteries on top of apartment blocks to help protect London from a Sept 11-style attack during this Olympic Games, after appalled residents said it could make them a target.

With 87 days to go before the games start, soldiers will start testing missile defences this week at six sites around the Olympic park as part of a training exercise in the run-up to Britain’s biggest peacetime security operation.

People living in one of the buildings earmarked for one of the missile batteries said they feared terrorists might attack their block and they were scared of the effects of shooting down a plane over a built-up area. However, military planners said they had to beef up security to cope with anything on the scale of the Sept 11, 2001 strikes or a smaller, “low and slow” strike by a single light aircraft.