International News Desk

London and Berlin are both raising internal security following intelligence reports that Al-Qaida are planning suicide attacks.  Germany’s famous Reichstag had been forced to close this week due to fears of an Al-Qaeda terrorist attack, and intelligence from German and British intelligence services.

The closure of the Reichstag came when intelligence services received reports that the Al-Qaeda together with Islamic terrorist organisation Jihad were planning to storm the German parliament building in Berlin and capture people as hostages and use them to force the country to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.

According to German authorities that details of the possible attack came from an anonymous source that was supposed to be involved in these plots. The anonymous informant said that two members of the terrorist group Jihad are already located in Germany and they had all the equipment to execute the attack at the Reichstag.

The FBI said that two men were expected to travel through the United Arab Emirates carrying travel documents in order to enter Europe and warned that a man by the name of Ibrahim Kaskar had previous connections with organised crime and that he was the man who sent activists to plot the attack.

In London the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Paul Stephenson said:

"Terrorism is here to stay. The circumstances that gave rise to it may change and terrorist organisation and state sponsorship may come and go but the phenomena is very unlikely to disappear".
“When considering the threat, we must remind ourselves that, since 9/11 in 2001, there have been numerous international terrorist plots disrupted in the UK by the combined efforts of the Security and Intelligence Services working side by side with Counter Terrorist policing. Had the terrorists been successful, each one of these plots could have resulted in mass fatalities."

Commenting on the threat by Al-Qaida the Commissioner of the Met Police said:

"These additional, competing demands on our Counter Terrorism policing resources serve to compound the broader and more prevalent threat from AQ-inspired attacks. These, of course, are all too well known. Public places have been attacked in Mumbai and Times Square, transport systems in Madrid and London, places of worship in Lahore, Istanbul and Iraq. We have seen attacks against UK nationals in Iraq and Afghanistan and two attacks this year in Yemen against embassy staff."

London and Berlin have raised security preparedness to a new three year high, following intelligence reports of potential suicide bombers, from home grown groups inspired by Al-Qaida.