Four Corners: Terror in the Skies

You know Four Corners is usually extra-good when it has a special from the UK’s Panorama.

This week it looks at an incident in 2006 when seven young men, all of them Muslim, all of them born in England, planned to board jet airliners bound for cities across the United States.

In their hand-luggage they would carry what looked like bottles of soft-drink but carried concentrated hydrogen peroxide.

Panorama’s Peter Taylor reveals the cat and mouse game played by intelligence agents as they tracked the plotters over a period of several months. He shows how the agents broke into premises rented by the men and how they used surveillance cameras and microphones to track their every move. Those cameras provided live footage of the terror suspects making the preparations to create bombs. Ultimately this surveillance was used to convict some of the men for their plan to blow up the planes. On the face of it this was a major victory for the British security services – but was it?

Now Panorama reveals evidence that American authorities, with possible authorisation from then President George W. Bush, may have become edgy and pushed the British agencies to arrest the men earlier than intended. The result? British police failed to get the evidence they needed to convict all the men on charges of conspiracy to murder by blowing up the planes.

If true it raises significant questions about the nature of the relationship between the British and American intelligence services.

The program also exposes the problem western countries now face when apparently law abiding citizens are radicalised to commit jihad.

This airs Monday 8.30pm on ABC1 and is repeated on the 29th September at 11.35pm.