heraldsun.com.au
- From: AAP
- February 09, 2011
A GROUP of Australians who are believed to be at terrorist training camps in Yemen pose a threat to airport security, a security expert has warned.
ABC Television's Foreign Correspondent has reported that 22 Australians have gone missing in Yemen and are believed to be at al-Qaeda training camps.Heading up the al-Qaeda regime in Yemen is an American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki who the ABC reported has been dubbed the Osama bin Laden of the internet.
Al-Awlaki has been allegedly involved in a number of terrorist attacks and in his internet sermons - delivered in perfect English - he preaches contempt for non-believers.
The 22 Australians are believed to be receiving training at these camps where their value is their Australian passports and the access they can gain with them.
"The authorities know who these people are," Homeland Security Asia Pacific director Roger Hennings told AAP.
"The government of Australia is aware of the identity of 22 Australians who went missing about four months ago, in other words they just got to Yemen and disappeared," he said.
"This constitutes a national security risk because all of these people left through Australian airports and when they return they will return through Australian airports."
Mr Hennings said these Australians were believed to be in al-Qaeda training camps in Yemen and there was nothing to stop them communicating with sympathisers in Australia.
According to Mr Hennings, 66 Australian citizens and residents have already been trained by al-Qaeda or in Pakistan by other terrorist organisations.
Major airports are areas of mass gathering which Mr Hennings says are critical to the security of the country.
Yet the majority of people working in airports don't understand how security threat levels work and Mr Hennings says there is a daily threat level to Australia's airports.
"If you call any airport in Australia they'll tell you that they meet federal government requirements and that's true because the federal government requirements are totally inadequate for 2011."
All people who work in airports should be briefed on terrorist threats, according to the director of Homeland Security.
"If an act is undertaken at Sydney Airport that puts the airport out of action the hit on the economy is $1 billion a week.
"What you have now is a very public knowledge of what's going on in Yemen, and it's time to address it in a much more formidable way than it has been in the past," he said.
Homeland Security has spent four years putting together a mitigation strategy that makes it mandatory for every person who works at an airport to be issued with Aviation Security Identification Cards (ASICs).
"It's our understanding that it's imminent that the government will make it mandatory for every person who works in an airport to go through a vetting system and be issued with photo ID.
"We have airports with thousands of people in them, that only a handful of people in them know what to do in an emergency. They don't even know where to look for a threat level - they should be posted throughout the airport for everybody who works there," Mr Hennings said.
"You've got evidence tonight on the ABC that these guys are capable of perpetrating anything they like anywhere in Australia.
"We don't want to be alarmist, we want to be proactive and knock it on the head."
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