Ships of terror

Terrorists are turning their attention to the seas, a vital and vulnerable area of world trade. MICHAEL RICHARDSON reports.

New Zealand is wise to be taking its port and shipping security seriously, even though it has not been publicly targeted, as Australia has been, for attack by the al Qaeda terrorist network or its Southeast Asian ally, Jemaah Islamiyah.

Since the early 1990s, the pattern of al Qaeda terrorist bombings has been to hit vulnerable places.

An al Qaeda cargo ship delivered the explosives that its agents used to bomb two US embassies in East Africa in August 1998, killing 224 people and injuring more than 5000. US investigators say they have evidence that al Qaeda was buying ships as early as 1994.

One sign of New Zealand's vigilance against a strike from the sea was the decision by Auckland port authorities last month not to permit a ship carrying ammonium nitrate fertiliser to dock at short notice. Instead, the Tasman Independence was sent on to its next scheduled port of call at Tauranga to unload the fertiliser at a berth well away from residential areas.

Ammonium nitrate, an agricultural fertiliser, is widely and legally available but is also of special interest to terrorists because it can be be made into a powerful explosive.

It was used to bomb the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1998 and in the van bombing outside the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta last August. The Irish Republican Army often used ammonium nitrate when turning vehicles into bombs and it was the main explosive in the truck bombing by US extremists in Oklahoma City in 1995, as well as in al Qaeda's first attempt to attack the World Trade Centre in New York in 1993.

Turkish police say that ammonium nitrate explosives were used in four suicide truck bombings in Istanbul last November that killed 61 people and British police late last month seized more than half a tonne of ammonium nitrate in London in anti-terrorist raids. Meanwhile, Australia's federal government has called for tighter controls over ammonium nitrate in Australia to ensure it is not bought by terrorists.

Vessels, or the cargo they carry, can be used in several ways by terrorists: to raise money, through legal or illegal trade; to covertly transport operatives, equipment and weapons; or to commandeer ships carrying explosive, inflammable or toxic substances to use as weapons in much the same way that al Qaeda used hijacked airliners to strike New York and Washington.

The terrorist network linked to al Qaeda understands the vital role of sea transport and has exploited it for years.

Last December US and allied forces on patrol in the Persian Gulf tracked and boarded several dhows, confiscating drug shipments worth more than US$15 million ($22.8 million). US officials said that seven of the 45 crewmen detained had links to al Qaeda and the organisation was using drug smuggling to help to finance its operations.

US officials blame al Qaeda for the suicide attack in Yemen in October 2000 against the American destroyer USS Cole when it was refuelling in Aden harbour. The two terrorists used a modified dinghy packed with explosives, nearly sinking one of the most sophisticated US warships. Seventeen American sailors were killed and 40 wounded. It took more than 14 months and cost US$250 million ($380 million) to repair the ship.

The French-registered oil tanker Limburg, carrying crude oil off the coast of Yemen, was crippled and set ablaze in October 2002 in another terrorist attack using an explosive-laden small boat, for which al Qaeda claimed responsibility.

The blast ripped through the double-steel hull of the tanker. It stayed afloat and the fire was eventually put out. But one sailor drowned when the crew abandoned the flaming ship. Some 90,000 barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Aden.

Al Qaeda's former chief of naval operations, Abdul Rahim Mohammed Hussein Abda Al-Nasheri, captured in Yemen in November, 2002, gave CIA investigators information that reinforced concerns about plans for terrorist attacks against shipping, civilian and military.

Al Qaeda has also used cargo containers on ships to ferry agents and probably terrorist-related material around the world. Documents seized from one of Osama bin Laden's senior aides six years ago show how the group intended to use containers packed with sesame seeds to smuggle highly radioactive material to the US.

Shortly before his capture in Pakistan in March last year, al Qaeda's director of global operations, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, offered to invest US$200,000 ($304,000) in an export firm in exchange for access to the containers used by the firm to ship garments to Port Newark in the New York-New Jersey harbour complex. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

The fear that terrorists could exploit the container transport system was confirmed barely a month after the al Qaeda attacks of September 11. In October 2001, authorities in the southern Italian port of Gioia Tauro discovered an unusually well-equipped and neatly dressed stowaway locked inside a shipping container. It was furnished with a bed, water, supplies for a long journey and a bucket for a toilet. Italian police named the stowaway as Rizik Amid Farid, 43, and said he was born in Egypt but carried a Canadian passport.

Farid was smartly dressed, clean-shaven and rested as he emerged. He had two mobile phones, a satellite phone, a laptop computer, several cameras, batteries and, ominously, airport security passes and an airline mechanic's certificate valid for four major American airports.

Gioia Tauro is a leading trans-shipment hub for cargo in the Mediterranean. The container fitted out as a makeshift home had been loaded in Port Said, Egypt.

Had the stowaway not been trying to widen ventilation holes when workers in Gioia Tauro were nearby, the box might well have passed unhindered to its final destination in Canada via Rotterdam.

Farid was charged with illegal entry into Italy and detained. But a court released him on bail and he disappeared before further information could be gathered.

The nature as well as the scale of the globalised trading system make it vulnerable to terrorist attack. Seaborne trade and its land connections in the international supply chain have become increasingly open.

In recent decades, the Asia-Pacific region has followed its main trade partners in North America and Europe in deregulating and encouraging freer trade. After the terrorist plots and bombings in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia, the region and its leading trade partners must tighten security at sea, in ports and in other parts of the logistic supply chain that delivers goods on a just-in-time, just-enough basis. This supply chain has become critical to modern manufacturing around the world.

Concerns about terrorists using ships as weapons was heightened last June when Greek commandos boarded a cargo ship that had been zig-zagging around the Mediterranean Sea for nearly six weeks. The Baltic Sky was found to be packed with 680 tonnes of ammonium nitrate-based explosive and 8000 detonators.

The ship's manifest said that the cargo was loaded in Tunisia bound for a company in Sudan. But Greek Shipping Minister Giorgos Anomeritis said the company, identified as Integrated Chemicals and Development, was just a post office box in Khartoum that did not exist.

The Tunisian firm that manufactured the explosives filed a complaint against the Baltic Sky, alleging that it had failed to fulfil a contract to deliver the cargo, intended for civilian use, to Sudan. It accused the captain and crew of diverting from their original route and threatening not to deliver the cargo to its rightful destination. The freighter apparently never headed towards the Suez Canal, the direction that would bring it to Sudan.

Greek officials said the Baltic Sky flew the flag of the Comoros Islands, a small Indian Ocean country, used by shipping companies to avoid taxes and regulation and guarantee anonymity and freedom from prosecution for the owner. The Comoros shipping register opened for business in late 2000 or early 2001 and branded itself as the world's first Islamic flag of convenience. Its office in Greece, known as the Shipping Activities Bureau, also marketed the North Korean flag.

The Baltic Sky was previously called the Sea Runner and flew a Cambodian flag. Its 37-year life in the shipping industry was marked by frequent changes of owner and flag, and frequent brushes with the law. After it was forced to dock, for safety reasons, in a remote Greek harbour the captain and crew were charged with illegal possession and transport of explosives.

The Greek merchant marine ministry said the Baltic Sky's cargo was the biggest quantity of explosives ever seized in the world from a ship sailing illegally. The Shipping Minister described the ship's potential explosive power as akin to an atomic bomb.

This was an exaggeration but it certainly would have wreaked havoc had it been detonated near a port city. In 1947 the port of Texas City on the Gulf of Mexico was devastated after two ships containing about 3300 tonnes of ammonium nitrate caught fire and exploded.

The death toll was 568 with another 3500 people injured . The port and its industrial zone were devastated. Property damage amounted to well over US$1 billion in today's dollars.

But the most dangerous possibility in maritime terrorism, which haunts many Western and Asian officials, is that terrorists might use a powerful radiological bomb, in which conventional explosives disperse deadly radioactive poison, or even a nuclear weapon, perhaps concealed in the one of more than 230 million containers that move through the world's ports each year.

Officials and counter-terrorism experts in the US, Europe and Asia have warned that the next step in mega-terrorism may be an attack using chemical, biological, nuclear or radiological weapons. A ship or container is regarded as one of the most likely delivery devices for a nuclear or radiological bomb.

The exposure in February of an extensive and long-running nuclear black market that funnelled weapons technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea from Pakistan has heightened these fears.

There is no evidence that al Qaeda or any other terrorist group has nuclear weapons. However, in the mid-1990s, al Qaeda agents tried repeatedly, though without success, to buy bomb-grade highly enriched uranium in Africa, Europe and Russia. In November 2001, Osama bin Laden announced that he had obtained a nuclear weapon, but US intelligence officials dismissed his claims.

Documents recovered from Afghanistan after the fall of the Taleban regime also described al Qaeda's nuclear ambitions.

No radiological attacks have been recorded. But in January last year, the BBC said it had evidence from British intelligence that al Qaeda had tried to assemble radioactive material to construct a dirty bomb in the Afghan city of Herat before the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. No dirty bomb was found, but officials were convinced that al Qaeda had the expertise to build one.

In June 2002, the US Government said it had arrested Jose Padilla, an American citizen and suspected al Qaeda operative, on his return to the US, disrupting a plan to attack the United States by exploding a radiological bomb.

Last December US prosecutors said a British arms dealer, held in the US on charges of trying to sell shoulder-fired missiles to shoot down airliners, would face additional charges of plotting to procure a dirty bomb. Hemant Lakhani, 68, who was born in India but holds a British passport, was arrested last August in an sting operation involving intelligence agencies from the US, Britain and Russia.

And last week the BBC reported intelligence agents in Britain and the US had foiled an alleged chemical bomb plot in Britain. The plot was believed to involve detonating a combination of explosive and a chemical called osmium tetroxide.

* Michael Richardson, a former Asia editor of the International Herald Tribune, is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. He is the author of A Time Bomb for Global Trade: Maritime-related Terrorism in an Age of Weapons of Mass Destruction [PDF].