Author: Robert F. Moore
Publication: Daily News
Date: November 17, 2006
URL: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/local/story/472233p-397332c.html
Introduction: Women terrorists real threat,
sez NYPD
That's not a pregnant belly - that's a bomb.
The NYPD is warning business owners to be
on the lookout for female jihadists who can hide explosives by faking pregnancy
or sweet-talk their way past security officers.
"The threat posed by women is real, and
it can't be overlooked," Rachel Weiner, an NYPD intelligence specialist,
said at a security conference yesterday.
The warning was not in response to a threat
against any specific targets in the city, but a general caveat for private
security in light of the radicalization of women in other parts of the world.
"What this means is that we don't have
the luxury of ignoring 50% of our population in assessing whether someone
is a threat," Weiner said.
Cossor Ali, a young mother among two dozen
suspects accused in a London-based plot to blow up U.S.-bound flights, intended
to use her 8-month-old baby's bottle to hide a liquid explosive, authorities
said.
Counter-terrorism experts noted that 19 of
the 41 Chechen militants in the 2002 siege of a Moscow theater were women,
part of a group known as the "black widows." More than 120 civilians
were killed.
Experts said yesterday that female terrorists
achieve martyr status among radicals. Wafa Idris, widely considered the first
female Palestinian suicide bomber, killed one person and injured more than
150 in an attack in Jerusalem in 2002. She has a Palestinian summer camp named
in her honor.
A growing number of female terrorists are
housewives, scientists or even teens schooled in the U.S. and Europe, officials
said yesterday, blurring the profile of would-be bombers.
During the NYPD Shield conference yesterday
at police headquarters, cops also gave business owners tips on the general
behavior of potential terrorists. The NYPD Shield is a security partnership
between cops and private businesses designed to prevent terrorist attacks.
Peter Patton, an NYPD intelligence specialist,
drew from an "Encyclopedia of Jihad" found at an Al Qaeda training
camp in Afghanistan, saying that 80% of jihadists' information is drawn from
public sources.
They read newspapers and scour the Internet
for maps and shareholder reports, he said. The other 20% of their information
comes from taking panoramic photos of potential targets, casually interviewing
security staff, examining surveillance equipment and traffic patterns onsite
and observing product delivery schedules.
In one of the most startling parts of the
multimedia session, Patton showed actual photos and video footage taken in
2000 by convicted plotter Abu Eisa al-Hindi, who was prosecuted under the
name Dhiren Barot. Among his desired targets were the New York Stock Exchange,
the Prudential building in Newark and the International Monetary Fund headquarters
in Washington.
The wanna-be terrorist kept detailed notes,
documenting in one building the exact number and location of surveillance
cameras, uniforms worn by security guards and discrepancies in security for
building employees and the public.
Hindi once sat at a Starbucks on consecutive
days staring at one of the potential targets.
"He was trying to figure out the best
time to launch an attack to inflict massive casualties," Patton said.
