NEW INTEL ON MARINE-TERROR PLOT

The UK's Sunday Telegraph (registration required) has reported that Jemaah Islamiah has been actively communicating about launching a marine-based terrorist attack.

Telegraph News Al Qa'eda terrorists 'plan to turn tanker into a floating bomb'
"Fanatics from the Islamic terror faction blamed for last week's suicide attack on the Australian embassy in Indonesia are planning to hijack an oil tanker or freighter and turn it into a floating bomb, The Telegraph has learned.
United States intelligence has passed on warnings about the plot to launch an attack in the region's busy shipping lanes to several countries, including Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. They acted after intercepting communications between activists from Jemaah Islamiah (JI), a network linked to al Qa'eda.
The terrorists have been discussing plans to seize a vessel using local pirates. The hijacked ship would be wired with explosives and then directed at other vessels, sailed towards a port or used to threaten the narrow and congested sea routes around Indonesia."

This has been a deep concern of mine for some time (note previous posts here, here and here).

Indonesia's security chief noted recently that captured JI members had revealed that such a plan was being considered. The 'new' element in the Telegraph story is that communications have been intercepted, which would imply that the plan has not yet been abandoned.

Should a liquified natural gas (LNG) or petrochemical tanker be hijacked and rigged as a bomb against a major port city, the casualties could potentially be greater than 9/11.

The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs notes:

According to James Fay, a leading LNG expert and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an explosive laden boat detonated next to or underneath an LNG ship - as in the case of both the USS Cole and the MV Limburg - would cause at least half of the onboard LNG to spill into the harbor creating a sea of searing fire hot enough to burn everything from buildings to people in a half-mile radius. “There’s no doubt that with a big enough bomb you can blow a hole in the side of a vessel and the cargo will burn,” Fay told the Associated Press on February 8, 2004. Within a distance of “a half-mile or so, you can get second-degree burns to exposed skin in about 30 seconds.

There are reasons to believe that planning for such an attack has entered a reasonably advanced stage. Aegis Defence Service in 2003 concluded that the hijackers operating in the Malacca Straits (which are shared by Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia) were in fact staged by terrorists gaining experience operating a large vessel and learning navigation skills for an eventual attack.

According to “The New Piracy,” an article published by Charles Glass in The London Review of Books, December 18, 2003, ADS maritime expert Dominic Armstrong referred to the incident as particularly alarming, “They (the pirates) were fully armed with automatic weapons, which is a departure from the norm. They went straight to the bridge rather than the safe room. And instead of ransacking the crew’s goods they steered a laden tanker for an hour through the Malacca Straits... the implication is that what we are seeing... is the equivalent of a flight-training school for terrorists.”

The International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) has more on the threat here.

Indonesia and Malaysia have argued against the participation of third-party states in coordinated anti-piracy patrols in the Malacca Straits.