Feedback - Dirty bomb attack 'a matter of time'

THE head of MI5 issued a chilling warning yesterday that the war against terror would not be won quickly, and cautioned that it was "only a matter of time" before a "crude" nuclear, biological or chemical attack.

Eliza Manningham-Buller, making her first public comments on the terrorist threat, spelled out a grim reality that there was an inexhaustible supply of potential terrorists being groomed by extremists to attack the West.

She said: "The supply of potential terrorists among extreme elements is unlikely to diminish. Breaking the link between terrorism and religious ideology is difficult."

Al-Qaeda was pinpointed as the "first truly global threat" by Ms Manningham-Buller, who said that recent fatal attacks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Casablanca in Morocco proved the terror network and other groups posed a "potent threat".

Ms Manningham-Buller said intelligence suggested that renegade scientists had told the international terrorist network how to make so-called "dirty" nuclear bombs.

But Ms Manningham-Buller, the director general of MI5, added that conventional bombs and suicide bomb attacks remained their preferred weapons.

"They [al-Qaeda] still remain an organisation capable of deadly terrorist attacks," she told a conference at the Royal United Services Institute in central London.

"The threat from international terrorism is with us for a good long time. If this is a war that can be won, it is not going to be won soon," she said.

Ms Manningham-Buller was making her first on-the-record speech yesterday since taking on her job in October last year.

She said recent decades had seen a change from state-sponsored terrorism to groups such as al-Qaeda and its allies. And she described 11 September as a watershed.

Ms Manningham-Buller went on: "We were shocked by the sheer scale of the devastation, which was beyond our imagination.

"There was plenty of intelligence before 11 September that something terrible was going to happen. That was reflected in the dossier on Osama bin Laden that the government published shortly after 11 September."

She added that intelligence services like her own would never give a complete picture. "Intelligence never tells you everything," Ms Manningham-Buller said. "In this subject, when it’s a global threat, it tends to be patchy and incomplete."

The joint terrorism analysis centre at MI5 receives about 150 new pieces of intelligence about possible terrorist threats every week.

But the complexity of alliances within terrorist networks such as al-Qaeda poses new challenges for the security services, she said.

The terror group’s willingness to strike soft targets and use suicide bombers made it difficult to stop, despite increased international co-operation and greater resources.

But Ms Manningham-Buller said demands for a root-and-branch review of Britain’s security services risked ignoring their positive work. "The system works," she added.

She said Britain had "unrivalled expertise" in combating terrorism, including a "robust and well established system in handling the threat".

And Britons themselves have a "robust and commonsense attitude about individual incidents and terrorism-related events".

Ms Manningham-Buller, 54, is the second woman to become head of MI5 and is the daughter of Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, the former Conservative attorney general and lord chancellor.