The Associated Press
LONDON- Al-Qaida has regrouped and is a greater threat than ever before, according to British intelligence officials, media outlets reported Thursday.
The Guardian newspaper and the British Broadcasting Corp. quoted unnamed counterterrorism officials as saying that despite a four-year campaign against it, the group had recovered its core organization in Pakistan and was fed by a steady stream of volunteers.
Intelligence experts believed al-Qaida saw Britain as a key target because of the large number of Britons with connections to Pakistan and heavy traffic between the two countries, the reports said.
“Al-Qaida sees the U.K. as a massive opportunity to cause loss of life and embarrassment to the authorities,” The Guardian quoted an unnamed intelligence source as saying.
It reported that the source had said al-Qaida saw the July 7, 2005, transit bombings that killed 52 commuters and the four bombers “as just the beginning.”
Officials at Britain’s Home Office said the department was undertaking its own review of Britain’s terrorist threat at the request of Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Home Secretary John Reid said last month that the country needed to develop a “seamless coordinated approach to the now seamless threat.”
“To counter radicalization as a nation, we need not only to tackle the immediate dangers but put in place the concept, doctrine, laws and capabilities for a challenge we expect will last a generation,” he told the governing Labour Party’s annual conference.
Experts quoted by the BBC and the Guardian said al-Qaida was operating in Britain much as the Irish Republican Army had _ with small, self-contained cells consisting of a leader, a quartermaster in charge of weapons and several volunteers.
“There is a hierarchy within each cell with a very tightly run command and control,” one source was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
The sources said potential recruits _ mostly Muslim men in their teens and 20s _ were put through a sophisticated regime of indoctrination and bonding, and that there seemed to be a ready supply of potential attackers.
“It’s like the old game of Space Invaders,” one source told The Guardian. “When you clear one screen of potential attackers, another simply appears to take its place.”