Hours before bombing I’d said: We don’t do terrorism in Scotland..
Former justice secretary Kenny MacAskill said he thought terrorism didn’t exist in Scotland – just hours before the 2007 Glasgow airport attack.
He was weeks into the job as part of Alex Salmond’s first minority Scottish Government when the country was given a “wake-up call”.
MacAskill had been chatting to a friend about the Government’s “resilience room” – used to co-ordinate responses to major incidents. Until that day, it had never been used to deal with a terror attack.
Hours later, Iraqi doctor Bilal Abdulla, 27, and Indian engineer Kafeel Ahmed, 28, had ploughed a Jeep Cherokee full of gas canisters into Glasgow airport. MacAskill said: “I recall it well. It was the official opening of parliament and I’d been discussing my first few weeks in St Andrew’s House with a friend.
“I was explaining about the emergency room that we use to deal with civil incidents. It would also deal with terrorism but I remember saying we didn’t have that in Scotland.”
Later that afternoon MacAskill got a call from the First Minister about the airport incident.
He said: “I jumped in my car and went to St Andrew’s House and into the emergency room I’d been talking about. It became quite clear it was a terror attack.”
The former SNP minister, who stepped down from Holyrood last year, added: “Perhaps in Scotland people don’t realise quite how close we came to an appalling incident.
“Had the driver not been so nervous and failed to make the appropriate cut, he would have got the vehicle in. Had he managed to get in and detonate that, we could have been looking at a lot of deaths.
“We were remarkably fortunate. It was a wake-up call.
“Scotland is not a No1 target, it’s not Berlin or Paris.
“But exactly as IRA bombs happened in Warrington, we had the Glasgow airport incident.
“Any community, anywhere, can suffer from terror.”