LONDON - Any one of the tens of thousands of shipping containers shuttled into the United States each day could conceal a weapon of mass destruction, say maritime security experts.
After hijackers used passenger aircraft as missiles to such deadly effect on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, security experts see shipping as a possible vehicle for a similar attack on the US.
"Our biggest fear is a fully loaded LNG [liquefied natural gas] tanker exploding in New York or Boston Harbour," a security adviser, William Callahan, said.
"But it doesn't have to be a tanker," he added. "It could be one twenty-foot container loaded with a nuclear device. It [the maritime trade] is the unprotected underside of America."
The US Administration is aware of this and experts have been rapidly drafted in to review the situation.
"We can see it right now - terrorists will shift their sights to some other modality of transportation in order to inflict pain on the US," Kim Petersen, of the Maritime Security Council, told a recent security hearing.
Petersen estimated that only 2 per cent of containers entering the US were inspected.
Immediately after last month's attacks, the US tightened port security and started reviewing Coast Guard operations.
London maritime security consultant Tim Spicer said: "Maritime security is not as good as it should be in the current climate, and people are scrambling to catch up."
Spicer said Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network seemed to be aware of the vulnerability of shipping to attack, as illustrated by the attack on the USS Cole in October last year when 17 were killed.
Other militant groups such as the Tamil Tigers, Abu Sayyaf and the ETA have also stepped up attacks on merchant shipping.
- REUTERS
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