The EU has tested its crisis co-ordination capabilities in a simulated bio-terrorist attack on a European football championship. The exercise comes amid reports of a real al-Qaeda plot targeting Britain, France and Germany and Norway’s arrest of three men planning attacks in Oslo and Copenhagen.
The fifth EU-wide exercise of its kind, conducted between 27 and 29 September 2010, was aimed at testing the co-ordination of crisis responses in the areas of health, transport, border control, public order and civil protection in a hypothetical bio-terrorist attack during the European football championship to be held in Poland and Ukraine in 2012.
The EU said the tests were “conducted successfully” and that “the lessons learned in particular with regard to information sharing and communication will allow for further improving the crisis coordination arrangements.”
News of the exercise came out one day after US and European intelligence agencies on Tuesday (28 September) indicated that Pakistani-based militants with links to al-Qaeda had planned to carry out terrorist strikes in the UK, France and Germany.
The strikes were to be modeled on the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, where a large group of gunmen landed in boats and opened fire on passers-by in several locations at the same time, killing 166 people.
According to the Wall Street Journal, US and European counterterrorism officials have been looking into the plot since August and are currently focusing on a man of unknown age said to be from North Africa and known as “Mauritani.” Some operatives are believed to have travelled from Pakistan’s tribal warlord-controlled regions via Turkey and Iran to Europe, a former counterterrorism official familiar with the case told the US newspaper.
Asked about the case at a joint press briefing with the EU’s Catherine Ashton in Washington on Wednesday, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said only: “We know that al-Qaida and its network of terrorists wishes to attack both European and US targets.”
