Posted on 07/05/2004 7:57:08 PM PDT by FairOpinion
KUALA LUMPUR: Asian governments were warned yesterday to prepare for possible deadly chemical attacks by terrorist groups, such as the al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiah (JI).
The warning came at a conference here, attended by more than 70 chemical weapons experts, security officials and policy-makers from 12 countries including Japan, China, Canada, the United States, Singapore and Thailand.
“There is a growing concern of the potential threat posed by chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons (CBRN) in the hands of terrorists,” said Zainal Abidin Zain, director-general of the South-East Asia Regional Centre for Counter-terrorism.
“Among all of the CBRN weapons, chemical weapons are potentially the easiest to be manufactured.
“It is possible to harvest deadly pathogens from nature with unsophisticated equipment and limited expertise,” he said, pointing to a religious cult's 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway, which killed 12 people and left 6,000 others ill.
Shinsuke Shimizu, director for International Counter-terrorism at Japan's Foreign Affairs Ministry, said chemical attacks do not require sophisticated dispersal mechanisms to cause panic among citizens.
Other advantages of such attacks for terrorists are that chemical agents are not easily detectable by traditional security measures and there is a time lag between the release of the bio-agent and the effect, he said.
Terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna, head of the Singapore-based International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research, is slated to talk on a “Recently Recovered Jemaah Islamiah Chem-Bio Manual” during the five-day seminar.
Well, that does not bode well.
In the meantime, people are against interrogating and holding the terrorists, without a lawyer...
I guess it's best if we don't find out and foil their attacks, just so their "rights" aren't violated.
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