It was only a matter of time before another terror attack took place on British soil following a spate of similar incidents across Europe.
Unfolding at the heart of British political power, Wednesday’s attack outside Westminster will be seen by Isis as a real propaganda coup.
“Terrorists rely on a lot of people watching — it can be even better than having a lot of people dead,” Frank Foley, a scholar of terrorism at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, told the Washington Post. “This person appears to have chosen relatively rudimentary weapons, and there was no explosion as far as we can tell.
“But they’ve attacked a very prominent target, Parliament and Westminster Bridge, and so they’ve immediately flooded the media. Every television station in Europe and America will be carrying this tonight and tomorrow.”
That the attacker could kill four pedestrians and injure 40, as well as murder a police officer, outside London’s most heavily guarded building has caused no little alarm.
On the other hand, the attacker was dealt with – shot dead – pretty quickly by police.
Writing in the Guardian, Simon Jenkins said the security measures in place and police response had proven as effective as could reasonably be expected: “In a busy modern city there is no way absolute security can be assured, but the police can say that the system was tested and worked. Short of holding parliament in a bunker, there are limits to what more can or should sensibly be done.”
The attack began at about 2:40pm on Wednesday when a lone attacker mounted the pavement over Westminster Bridge in a grey Hyundai i40. After ploughing through pedestrians the vehicle then crashed into railings outside the Houses of Parliament.
Armed with a knife the attacker managed to stab an unarmed officer – PC Palmer – who later died. The attacker was shot dead by armed officers.
The attacker appeared to enter Westminster through the Carriage Gates, the main access point for cars and other vehicles to the Parliamentary estate. While entry is only granted with a security pass, these gates do open and close throughout the day to let authorised vehicles through.
The attacker managed to breach this entrance and got 20 or 30 yards inside the gates and into New Palace Yard before he was gunned down by police officers.
The gates used to be left open, but the 2008 Mumbai attacks prompted a rethink. Regular emergency drills were also introduced, including rehearsals of lockdowns within the House of Commons and House of Lords.
The Westminster attack happened on the anniversary, to the day, of the suicide bombing in Brussels that killed more than 30 people.
Low tech
In January David Anderson QC, a former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, noted a “realisation on the part of the terrorists that they don’t need sophisticated explosives plots to take great numbers of lives”.
Harnessing everyday things like cars and knives is also less likely to raise suspicion. Making bombs usually leaves a digital paper trail,while suspects have been arrested following the purchase of suspiciously large quantities of fertiliser.
In one sense, the use of cruder tactics is a testament to the success of security services.
Dominic Casciani, the BBC’s home affairs correspondent, has written that “the days when terrorism meant large, complex bombs and months of planning are gone: Western security agencies – particularly MI5 and its partner agencies – are very, very good at identifying those plots and disrupting them. The longer it takes to plan such an attack, the more people who are involved, the more chances there will be for security services to learn what is going on.”
Looked at another way, the deployment of simpler, yet still devastating methods is also a depressing reminder that when your enemy has no qualms about killing citizens – including fellow Muslims and children – or about dying themselves, it’s not always possible to thwart them.
Counterproductive coverage
Simon Jenkins thinks the media must act more responsibly and resist blanket coverage of terror attacks. “The terrorist is helpless without the assistance of the media and those who feed it with words and deeds,” he wrote in his column. “In his thoughtful manual, Terrorism: How to Respond, academic Richard English points out that the so-called threat to democracy, about which politicians like to talk at such times, lies not in any bloodshed and damage.
“It is the more real danger ‘of provoking ill-judged, extravagant and counterproductive state responses’. But this puts those who choose to be ‘provoked” in a peculiar and compromising position. Only if the media respond in a certain way can the terrorists achieve whatever spurious ends they may have.”
While it’s unrealistic to expect the media to relegate the story to the margins, Jenkins’s perhaps has a point. At the very least, the UK newspapers could emulate their French counterparts in not naming terrorists to deprive them of posthumous glory.
Then again, radical Islamists carry out attacks in the belief they are destined for an eternal, blissful afterlife, so a bit of notoriety on planet Earth is hardly the sole, or even most compelling, motivation.
Hostile vehicle mitigation
The attack also raises questions about the need for hostile vehicle mitigation, although it is simply not practical to have barriers and bollards along every stretch of urban road in the UK.
Gavin Queit, director of GK Solutions, a Melbourne-based company that specialises in hostile vehicle mitigation, thinks “London has done a lot of work in this regard. It has compartmentalised the city into small areas, which means it’s not going to have a Nice attack where there is a massive death toll,” he said.
Speaking to the Sydney Morning Post, Queit said there are three essential aspects to minimising the damage of vehicle-ramming attacks: intelligence, physical barriers such as bollards, and a quickfire response by police.
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Last weeks sickening attack on London may be a tragic manifestation of an ever present threat, but it is perhaps worth just briefly commenting on a few points raised in this article. “The attacker managed to breach this entrance and ….” Purely on the basis of what little information has been reported in the media, I would venture to suggest that this wasn’t technically a breach in a literal sense, but rather a relatively minor lapse in security that allowed the attacker access through the softest part of the estates outer perimeter. Had an armed officer been in closer proximity… Read more »