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Monday, Sep 12, 2005
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Hasan Suroor
LONDON: The former head of British police John Stevens has claimed that the Al-Qaeda planned to assassinate Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie, during the Queen's Golden Jubilee celebrations in 2002, and it was a "tribute'' to intelligence services that nothing untoward happened. In his memoirs, "Not for the Faint-hearted: My Life Fighting Crime" serialised in a Sunday newspaper, Lord Stevens discloses that, according to the intelligence gathered during a surveillance operation, a sniper was to have shot the couple during the Golden Jubilee parade on the Mall in Central London. He says that he ordered a massive security operation even as Mr. Blair remained "absolutely unfazed'' and the couple stuck to their plans. "I was constantly scanning faces in the crowd for signs of trouble and thinking, I hope to God nothing comes from somewhere. The fact that nothing untoward did happen was again a tribute to our intelligence gathering and the precautions we took," Lord Stevens writes. The News of the World, which published extracts from the book, reported Lord Stevens as saying that the threat from terrorists was "like a storm rumbling on the horizon, with occasional outbreaks of thunder and lightning''. Lord Stevens, who retired early this year, was criticised by the then Home Secretary David Blunkett for sending tanks to Heathrow airport in 2003 following reported threats of a terror attack saying that the sight of tanks would "terrify the public''.
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