Smash hit

For the intelligence officials on Cobra, the details of the planned attacks had a grimly familiar ring. The plot to bring down several planes recalled 9/11, while the lone bomber recalled the shoe bomber Richard Reid. In 1987 a South Korean jet with 115 people on board was brought down with a liquid explosive thought to have been concealed in a bottle of drink. But they had most in common with the al-Qaeda mission Operation Bojinka to explode 12 liquid bombs on aircraft flying to the US in 1995.

Those plotters planned to detonate explosives using digital watches converted into detonators. Batteries would be smuggled in the bombers’ shoes. The liquid chemical explosives were to be hidden in fruit juice bottles, children’s dolls and contact lens liquid containers.

Operation Bojinka’s mastermind was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who adapted the plot into the 9/11 attacks, with his nephew Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York in 1993.

The liquid bombs for that operation, made from nitroglycerin, were designed to get through baggage security checks. On a test run in December 1994, Yousef successfully hid batteries in his shoes as he boarded a flight from Manila to Narita. He timed the bomb to explode four hours after he left the aircraft. A Japanese businessman was killed but the aircraft made an emergency landing and the other 272 passengers survived.

Operation Bojinka was uncovered in January 1995 when a fire broke out in the Manila flat where the bombers brewed their chemicals. Police discovered bottles containing unknown substances, US court documents state. A cocktail of deadly ingredients was stored in the flat, along with a manual written in Arabic describing how to build a liquid bomb. There were numerous watches. The entire plot was described on Yousef’s computer.

When Yousef was arrested in February 1995, hiding in an hotel room in Islamabad, investigators found dolls wearing clothes containing nitrocellulose. He was sentenced to 240 years in prison by a US court.

Michael Chertoff, the US Homeland Security Secretary, said that the British plot was “getting really quite close to the execution stage”. For British and American crisis planners, the date August 22 looms large. This year it corresponds in the Islamic calendar to the day in 1427 which Muslims commemorate as when Muhammad took flight on the winged horse Buraq to the “furthest mosque”, usually assumed to be Jerusalem. Bernard Lewis, an expert on the Middle East, writes: “This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world.”

President Ahmadinejad of Iran has cited August 22 as the date on which he will give his final answer on nuclear development. The suggestion that the foiled British plot involved blowing up aircraft over towns and cities corresponds with a longstanding ambition held by al-Qaeda.

The first statements on the British plot came from Scotland Yard at 5.40am yesterday. Just before 10am, Paul Stephenson, the Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said that the plot had been intended to inflict “mass murder on an unimaginable scale”.

Mr Reid echoed that assessment: “The loss of life to innocent civilians would have been on an unprecedented scale.”

The latest suspected plot is the fourteenth to have been foiled by MI5 and the police in the past six years. Security sources said there were still “dozens” of other suspected conspiracies. Hours before the operation to thwart the attacks, Mr Reid said that Britain was facing “probably the most sustained period of severe threat since the end of the Second World War”. He did not need the word “probably”. He knew what was coming.

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