Police, SAS train for Mumbai-style attack in U.K.

Published 27 October 2010

Commandos of Britain’s elite Special Air Squadron(SAS) are reportedly conducting a series of counter-terrorism exercises to train the country’s police to foil 2008 Mumbai-style attacks on England; police armed response units are being given more powerful weapons; the job of the police would be to contain the situation while the job of the SAS (Special Air Service), if called upon, would be to resolve it

In the wake of the recent Europe-wide alert of an impending al Qaeda strike, commandos of Britain’s elite Special Air Squadron(SAS) are reportedly conducting a series of counter-terrorism exercises to train the country’s police to foil 2008 Mumbai-style attacks on England.

The U.K. security chief ordered an acceleration in police training to prepare for any future Mumbai-style terror strikes in public places,” the BBC reports, quoting top officials.

The report said Police Armed Response Units were being equipped with more powerful weapons to deal with multiple terrorists going on the rampage with automatic weapons — à la Mumbai.

This is the first time the Metropolitan police have been asked to undertake specialized training,” a Whitehall official was quoted as having said.

The report said plans were firmed up for an SAS unit to be stationed in London throughout the 2012 Olympics. The SAS is considered the one of world’s most lethal specialized forces with its history stretching back to world war two, especially in combating terror threats.

The BBC reports that police armed response units are being given more powerful weapons.

A Whitehall official told the BBC the Metropolitan Police had not been asked to do this before. He said the job of the police would be to contain such a situation while the job of the SAS (Special Air Service), if called upon, would be to resolve it.

RTT News reports that a Home Office spokesman would neither confirm or deny the BBC report, except saying his ministry would not comment on either intelligence or operational matters, much less, specific threats. The police regularly trained and conducted exercises for many scenarios with several partners, he added.

In the 2008 attacks on the major Indian western metropolis of Mumbai, ten Islamic terrorists from Pakistan went on a three-day rampage, targeting various landmarks and killing more than 166 persons and injuring over 300 others.

Britain’s national-terrorism threat level, set by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Center (JTAC), remains at “severe,” the second highest, implying that a terrorist attack is thought “highly likely” but not “imminent.”