‘Forget your mobile – look out for terrorists’

A FORMER spy chief has said she is “alarmed” by the numbers of people on mobile phones and listening to music when they should be more alert to the danger of a terror attack on the streets.

Baroness Neville-Jones said the public had to take personal responsibility and be aware of their surroundings.

The ex- head of the Joint Intelligence Committee suggested people must get used to disruption to their daily lives as a result of counter-terrorism operations and security alerts. Official guidance is for people to be “alert but not alarmed” at the terror threat, but Lady Neville-Jones suggested citizens were not as vigilant as they could be.

“I am alarmed by the number of people I see wandering along the street entirely engaged in their mobile telephones and with their ears plugged into music and they are not aware of their surroundings,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. She said action such as that taken in Munich, where two railway stations were shut on New Year’s Eve by a suspected terror threat, would become more likely. They were reopened after there was no sign of an imminent attack.

Lady Neville-Jones added: “That is prudence and proper caution on the part of intelligence and the police.”

She said the authorities had to take any intelligence seriously: “You may not be comfortable about having a broader picture – part of the problem with intelligence is it can be fragmentary – but it’s a very bold government or policeman who chooses not to take precautions in such circumstances.

“I think the population on the whole would prefer them to be cautious.”

She played down the prospect of UK cities being locked down as Brussels was recently, highlighting the British experience of coping with terrorism.

“I do think that counter-terrorism and both the intelligence side of it and the policing side of it ... are matters which are bred of long experience and of great skill and I think that in this country we do have both of those things and we have very close co-operation.

“I don’t think those skills are nearly so widespread on the Continent.”

‘I am alarmed by the people I see engaged in their phones and they are not aware of their surroundings.’