Sky marshals a 'sensible' step, says expert

The decision to deploy armed air marshals on some passenger planes is a “sensible” step in the fight against terrorism, an expert said today.

Professor Paul Wilkinson, from the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews University, said al-Qaida operatives still wanted to target civil aviation.

He said the move reflected the heightened terrorist threat to Britain and the US, where the level of alert was raised shortly before Christmas.

“These measures are sensible given the genuinely higher level of threat that we are all facing,” he said.

“We are facing a much more severe terrorist problem and that calls for more stringent measures than we have been used in the past.”

Sky marshals had been used successfully in other countries such as Israel for some time, he said.

But he said security measures at many airports were still not tight enough, making on-board security particularly important.

“It they are letting people through who might try to carry out suicide hijackings the danger to people on the ground as well as in the air is enormous.”

The main threat is from al-Qaida and its affiliated organisations, which carried out “the most lethal terrorist attacks ever launched in the history of modern terrorism” using hijacked planes on September 11.

“It’s not as if they have suddenly veered away from an interest in civil aviation, therefore we have to take the threat to civil aviation seriously,” he said.

Obvious targets would be on “prestige” routes to capital cities, he added.

“With the higher level of threat, we have to protect against attacks on civil aviation and the sky marshals idea is a good one.

“I know that some pilots have been opposed to it and I think that that view really has little relevance to the present level of terrorist threat.”