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Police warn of finance hub attack
SPECIAL REPORTLONDON, England (CNN) -- A new terrorist attack on London's key financial district, the City of London, is only a matter of time, the police chief for the area responsible says. James Hart, commissioner of the City of London Police, told the Financial Times there had been "hostile reconnaissance" of the City on several occasions since September 11, 2001. "Every successful terrorist group pre-surveys its target. There's no doubt that we've been subject to that surveillance and that sort of thing has been successfully disrupted," he told the newspaper. He said that the area had been a terrorist target for three decades, saying: "Look at the number of time we were hit by the IRA. I think (another attack) is a question of when rather than if." Hart said potential targets that had been staked out included iconic sites, businesses and prominent buildings, "anywhere where the maximum damage can be inflicted on the financial systems of the City of London and (where you can) associate that with mass murder and maximum disruption." In a warning to London business leaders, Hart estimated that only 50 percent of businesses had contingency plans in place in case of an attack. He blamed chief executives and boards for inadequate contingency planning. London business lobby groups told the Financial Times they welcomed his comments but said their main concern was the lack of preparedness of small and medium-sized businesses to cope with the economic fall-out of an attack. Hart told the paper he believed that the teams responsible for the London attacks last month were not so much terrorist "cells" as loose affiliations with connections to criminal expertise. As such, they had no direct or indirect link to al Qaeda but were a third-tier grouping with intellectual sympathies to al Qaeda propaganda, he said. The police chief for London's banking hub said the mindset of would-be terrorists meant the financial centers of western governments were prime targets. "If you want to hurt the government, hurt people at the same time, and you want to cause maximum disruption ...where better to hit than at the financial center?" The commissioner said there had been no arrests by police investigating surveillance by terrorist groups, but added that all information had been passed on to intelligence agencies. He added that the security cordon around the "Square Mile" as London's financial district is known has been extended as far as was practicable. Among IRA bombings in the City London were the attack at Bishopgate in April 1993 which killed one and injured 40. The explosion shook buildings, shattered hundreds of windows and caused a mediaeval church, St Ethelburga's, to collapse. The cost of repairing the damage was estimated at more than £1 billion. Further east from the City of London, in February 1996 the IRA broke a cease-fire with an attack on buildings at South Quay in the new Docklands development which killed two people. A month earlier the IRA had planted what was at the time the largest bomb yet seen on the British mainland, with almost three tons of explosives, at Britain's tallest building, Canary Wharf. It was safely defused. 
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