Terrorists’ next target: Cruise ships in the Med
CRUISE ships in the Mediterranean could be targeted in a terror attack by militant groups armed with Russian weapons, a top British commander warned yesterday.
Vice Admiral Clive Johnstone, the UK’s highest-ranking naval officer in Nato, said Islamic State’s spread into Libya casts an ‘uncomfortable shadow’ over the sea.
In stark remarks, he revealed IS terror factions are attempting to build a navy to wage war against the west.
He said there was a ‘horrible opportunity’ that a ‘very high quality weapons system’ would be used to hit ships crossing the sea, having ‘extraordinary implications’ for the Western World. Speaking on-board a Spanish Nato ship in London yesterday, Vice Admiral Johnstone said that Nato must not get ‘hustled out’ of eastern Mediterranean water space.
He said: ‘Nato mustn’t think the Mediterranean is just about immigration. It is the spread along the North African seaboard, it is the Daesh entry into Libya, it is the Daesh control of
‘We know they want
a maritime arm’
Sirte and other places, which has an uncomfortable shadow over maritime trade and maritime access.’
Conflict and revolt across the region had made it more difficult for Nato countries, including Britain, to ‘ascertain what threats are there’, he said.
He added: ‘At the same time, we are tracking the spreads of really quite capable Korean, Chinese and Russian (military) hardware, into bodies such as Hamas, Hezbollah and others.’
While they were not targeted at Nato or commercial shipping at the moment, he said: ‘There is a horrible opportunity in the future that a misdirected, untargeted round of a very high quality weapons system will just happen to target a cruise liner, or an oil platform, or a container ship. The eastern Mediterranean has started to become a competed space.
‘We are not in any war, we are not in any period of tension, but there are quite a lot of actors with a say there and we have just got to make sure we can access that, with all the freedom of navigation in international law we want. Does it worry me, yes, quietly it does worry me a bit.’ He said he believed an attack on ships such as cruise liners would be an act ‘which is almost a mistake… or it will be an act of random terrorism that will suddenly have extraordinary implications for the Western world’.
While there is no threat to shipping from Islamic State currently, he said Nato had watched them ‘grow and morph in such extraordinary ways’, that he could not predict the future.
‘We know they have had ambitions to go off shore, we know they would like to have a maritime arm, just as al Qaeda had a maritime arm’, he said.
Last year it was revealed that IS militants were building a ‘retreat zone’ in Libya to avoid air strikes in Syria and Iraq. As many as 3,000 jihadist fighters are believed to have travelled to the country to create a strategic hub for recruits unable to reach IS in its Syrian heartland.