MAJOR DELAYS are inevitable at Heathrow airport after British home secretary Alan Johnson’s declaration yesterday that body scanners are to be introduced within three weeks, along with extra body searches immediately.
The measures, which will include tests on luggage for explosives, are being taken following the foiled attempt to blow up an aircraft landing in Detroit from Amsterdam on Christmas Day, Mr Johnson told the House of Commons yesterday.
“It is clear that no one measure will be enough to defeat inventive and determined terrorists and there is no single technology which we can guarantee will be 100 per cent effective against such attacks,” he said.
Once introduced at Heathrow, the body scanners will be brought into use in other British airports, while security staff in all will be trained to spot suspicious activity by passengers.
All UK airports will have to have explosives scanners by the end of the year.
The British Government will examine whether “additional targeted passenger profiling” will increase passengers’ security, Mr Johnson told MPs, offering the first update since the Detroit attack was stopped.
“We will be considering all the issues involved, mindful of civil liberties concerns, aware that identity based-profiling has its limitations, but conscious of our overriding obligations to protect people’s life and liberty,” he said.
Meanwhile, th*e British Government sought to dampen tensions with the White House over an earlier British suggestion that it had warned the US authorities about the Nigerian man arrested in Detroit, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab.
On Monday, Mr Brown’s spokesman indicated that the US had been warned a year ago that the 23-year-old was an extremist.
However, yesterday he said there was “no suggestion” that the US was given intelligence which it did not act on.
Mr Johnson told MPs that the UK had passed on “routine” intelligence to the US about Mr Mutallab when he was denied a student visa and had been added to a British watchlist in April 2009, but it did not flag him to the US as a terror threat.