MI5 chief warns that terrorists may target food supplies

Al-Qa'ida terrorists could be planning to use food poisoning and homemade chemical weapons against targets in Britain, the head of MI5 warned last night.

Eliza Manningham-Buller said there would almost certainly be a "high" level of threat from Islamic terrorism for the next five years and stressed al-Qa'ida was seeking new targets and methods of attack.

The director general of the domestic intelligence service told an audience in central London that terrorist targets could include "the chemical and food industry" and that MI5 needed to help step up security in those areas.

She said MI5, the UK Security Service, and the police were already working closely with nuclear and power suppliers, as well as the water and transport industries, all of which are considered to be vulnerable to attack.

"But the changed nature of the threat has meant that we need to extend that advice to new sectors such as the chemical and the food industry, which today may present an attractive target for terrorists," Ms Manningham-Buller said.

Supermarkets and other food outlets and manufacturers have long been considered "soft" targets for attack from poison or contamination, as they are virtually impossible to guard all the time. Chemical manufacturers are also seen as potential targets because of the proliferation on the internet of information about how to make bombs and poisons from fairly basic ingredients. IRA terrorists have long used fertiliser as a key component of explosives.

In only her second public speech since her appointmenta year ago, Ms Manningham-Buller said her 2,000-strong organisation had uncovered evidence of a series of sophisticated networks of terrorists and their supporters operating in Britain and Europe.

She warned in June that it was "only a matter of time" before al-Qa'ida terrorists mounted a nuclear, chemical, or biological attack on a Western city. Reinforcing that warning yesterday she said: "I see no prospect of a significant reduction in the threat posed to the UK and its interests from Islamist terrorism over the next five years, and I fear for a considerable number of years thereafter." She said the Security Service was assessing an average of 100 pieces of "threat intelligence" worldwide every week. "That means intelligence related to a plan or intention to mount a terrorist attack," she explained. She said one of her colleagues, having read a "gloomy" intelligence report, joked that holidays were "only safe in Antarctica". But she said the public should not get the terrorism threat out of proportion and she did not have "sleepless nights and nails bitten to the quick".

Delivering the James Smart Lecture, entitled "Global Terrorism: are we meeting the challenge?" at the headquarters of the City of London Police, she continued: "Western security services have uncovered networks of individuals, sympathetic to the aims of al-Qa'ida, that blend into society, individuals who live normal, routine lives until called upon for specific tasks by another part of the network.

"Some of these individuals are in the UK. Not all of them fit the stereotypical profile of a terrorist sometimes portrayed in the media. It is for this reason that we continue to believe that there is a threat of an attack here in the UK."

She concluded: "The threats of chemical, biological and radiological and suicide attacks require new responses and the Government alone will not achieve all of it; industry and even the public must take greater responsibility for their own security." She urged the public to help the Security Service and the police by reporting any suspicious activity.