On 10 August 2006, holidaymakers arrived at British airports to find thousands of flights cancelled and security checks in chaos.
New rules imposed with immediate effect required all hand baggage to be taken into aircraft holds and air passengers to carry nothing apart from transparent bags containing essentials like their passports and wallets.
Liquids, apart from verified baby milk and prescription medicines, were banned. The disruption caused at Heathrow Airport was so extreme that British Red Cross volunteers were deployed to assist thousands of stranded travellers.
The upheaval was the consequence of a terror plot to take down multiple transatlantic flights using liquid explosives disguised as soft drinks, and detonated using adapted disposable cameras.
But two decades later, its impact is still being felt on global air travel as airports struggle to bring in new technology designed to ensure a similar attack cannot be attempted again.
‘More deaths than 9/11’
The police who foiled the 2006 plot did not immediately know the scale of the terrorists’ ambitions.
Peter Clarke, who at the time was the head of the Metropolitan Police’s anti-terrorist branch, recalled how the men behind it were initially in a large pool of al-Qaeda linked networks being monitored in the wake of 9/11 and the July 2005 London bombings.
“There were hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals that we and the Security Service were interested in,” Clarke told The i Paper. “When in early 2006 we started looking at this particular group, we had to take it very seriously.”
Suspicions that a plot was underway had intensified after ringleader Abdulla Ahmed Ali, who had previously only appeared on the periphery of investigations into jihadist terrorism, met with an al-Qaeda attack planner in Pakistan.
Peter Clarke, then Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, speaking at a press conference on the plot on 21 August 2006 (Photo: Chet Susslin/Bloomberg via Getty Images)Surveillance revealed his links to a fellow plotter, their repeated visits to an east London flat where neither of them lived, and a series of suspicious purchases.
After MI5 installed bugging devices in the property, they overheard the pair draining and modifying soft drink bottles – and recording “martyrdom” videos – while an associate was stockpiling large quantities of chemicals.
It was immediately clear that the group were planning a bombing of some kind, but the precise nature of their plot was a mystery until a surveillance team tracked Ali to an internet cafe and saw him researching and recording flight timetables for planes travelling from Heathrow to cities across the US and Canada.
Clarke said that with the combination of the number of volunteer suicide bombers, the explosive components compiled and the internet cafe research, investigators’ “best guess” is that seven flights would have been targeted
“We’re talking thousands of people on board,” he added. “If it had gone ahead as they intended it to, it could well have resulted in more deaths than 9/11.”
Operation Overt
The operation to stop the attack – codenamed “Overt” – was at the time the largest surveillance operation in the history of MI5 and the Metropolitan Police.
It revealed that the terror cell, who were trained and directed by senior al-Qaeda members based in Pakistan, had devised a novel method of drilling holes into soft drink bottles and refilling them with explosive liquid that could be ignited using modified batteries and a disposable camera.
After experimenting with food colouring and glue guns, the plotters found they could make their devices appear to be unopened bottles of Oasis and Lucozade. The cameras and adapted battery detonators, meanwhile, would outwardly look like completely normal items to take on holiday.
As the police and MI5 began to make plans to arrest the group, and to inform allies in the US and other countries, it became apparent that revealing the potential for planes to be downed using liquid explosives would have a significant impact on aviation security.
Screens displaying the emergency restrictions at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on 10 August 2006 (Photo: Jose More/Chicago Tribune via Getty Images)“I remember sitting in a COBR meeting in London, where people responsible for transport security was setting out how they were going to have to respond to this, and thinking that it was going to cause absolute chaos and lots of difficulty and inconvenience for the travelling public, as indeed it has for the last 20 years,” Clarke said.
By the time police swept in to arrest the would-be bombers on the night of 9 August 2006, emergency baggage restrictions had been drawn up and air travel was about to change for longer than anyone could have foreseen.
Travel chaos
The following day, the UK’s terror threat level was upgraded to “critical”, meaning an immediate attack was deemed highly likely, and restrictions on hand luggage were imposed on flights taking off from Britain, the US and around the world.
Chaos ensued. A parliamentary report issued the following year found that British Airways alone had cancelled 1,283 flights, affecting over 100,000 passengers, because of delays in the immediate aftermath. Airlines had lost millions of pounds.
Disruption eased after a security compromise was agreed – liquids of no larger than 100ml in a transparent one-litre plastic bag – and airports and passengers gradually adjusted to the new routine. But frustrations over the application of the hand baggage restrictions have continued over the ensuing 20 years.
In 2019, then-prime minister Boris Johnson announced that an evolution in scanning technology meant that two litres of liquids, in any individual quantity, would be permitted.
But deadlines imposed by successive governments on the installation of the new scanners repeatedly slipped, and UK airports are currently operating a mix of restrictions.
Some, including Heathrow, Gatwick, Edinburgh, Belfast and Birmingham, allow liquids in containers up to two litres to be left inside cabin bags.
However, others, such as Manchester and Stansted, still limit individual containers to 100ml because they say they are waiting for official approval of their new scanning systems.
A spokesperson for the Department for Transport said the UK has “one of the most robust aviation security regimes in the world”. Passengers should check with airports before they travel, and come with liquids in containers no larger than 100ml unless advised otherwise, they added.
For Clarke, the continued upheaval is a price worth paying, particularly in light of terrorist groups’ “enduring fascination with aviation”.
“When you see the sophistication of what they were trying to do and what the impact would have been,” he said, “to have done anything other than go down the route which everybody did would have been completely irresponsible.”
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