An unconfirmed tip about a planned terrorist attack has prompted increased surveillance in the city, as a precaution.
By Charles Savage, The Miami Herald
Responding to unsubstantiated intelligence from North Africa about plans for a terrorist attack in Miami this week -- the second area-specific threat in the past couple of weeks -- police have boosted patrols to “orange alert” levels.
While warnings about vague threats are common, Miami Police Chief John Timoney said there have been only four that singled out the Miami area in his nine-month tenure.
He and Miami Mayor Manny Diaz, appearing together at Miami City Hall on Tuesday, emphasized that they are boosting patrols only as a precaution.
“The FBI does not believe this is credible and it should not be cause for panic or fear,” Diaz said. “It’s not the first or the last time this is going to happen in today’s world.”
Miami police issued a press release about the warning late Monday because word leaked after the department contacted private security at institutions including “colleges, the hotel industry, and downtown businesses,” which is protocol, Timoney said.
Timoney said the most recent threat, which the FBI passed to the city last week, mentioned Miami and a certain day, apparently sometime this week.
However, he said, rumors among law enforcement officials that authorities had been specifically warned about a suicide bombing were “a misinterpretation.”
Source not identified
Timoney said the source of the threat was intelligence gathered in North Africa but provided no other details.
The United States and Egypt have been partners in the war on terrorism. Also, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi has said his country and the United States were exchanging information about the al Qaeda terror network.
FBI spokeswoman Judy Orihuela confirmed by phone that the agency did not believe the threat was credible but had passed it on anyway.
“Any major city is going to get its fair share of unsubstantiated threats,” she cautioned.
Orihuela also said she had not been told about a similar but apparently unrelated warning about Miami in recent weeks. Timoney revealed the previously undisclosed threat in a conversation with a Herald reporter after the press conference.
He said only that the earlier threat came “a couple of weeks ago” and had mentioned four cities, of which Miami was one.
The Miami-Dade Police Department declined to comment on whether it also was augmenting its patrols this week.
The nation’s current alert level is yellow or “elevated.” The level has been raised to orange or “high” four times, most recently in May, after terrorist bombings in Saudi Arabia and Morocco.
Earlier this summer, Larry Spring, the city of Miami’s budget chief, said that every time the U.S. Department of Homeland Security goes to orange alert, the city spends $4,500 a day on overtime pay for officers sent to guard high-profile facilities and utilities.
Database tracks threats
Orihuela said the local FBI office created a database to track terrorism threats in November. She said an internal report showed that as of July 2003, nearly 1,800 separate tips had been logged.
About 1,350 were generated by members of the local public reporting suspicious activity, she said, while the rest came from FBI headquarters or other agencies.
More than half the local division’s 420 agents are now tasked to antiterrorism investigations, and one squad is dedicated to running down such tips, she said.
One federal source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that terrorist false alarms are a growing concern.
`Resources get wasted’
“Look, that’s one of the biggest problems we have today,” the source said. ‘People use the `T’ word and everyone drops everything. It’s like yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. You have to run on it. You have to check it out. You can’t wait for the planes to go into the building. But it’s a problem. A lot of resources get wasted.”
But, given the seriousness of the situation, Orihuela said, the agency encourages people to report any suspicious activity, just in case.
“We’d much rather that people call than worry that their information might turn out not to be true, so we appreciate all the calls that we do get,” she said. “Of course, that’s different from the ones that are intentionally false. We certainly investigate those to the fullest extent and prosecute people who do that.”