The London response: How to handle future terror attacks

When the reports of two incidents outside the British Parliament emerged from London some weeks ago, bearing the all-too-familiar style of terror attacks replicated by the ‘lone wolves’ in Europe, social media went berserk linking it to the Islamic State (IS) and drawing parallels with the brutal Nice and Berlin attacks last year. However, there were no confirmed reports on who the assailants were or why the attack was carried out. An assailant drove his car into pedestrians killing four civilians and injuring 40 others on the Westminster Bridge, and then stabbed a policeman outside the British Parliament before he was shot dead by the police. The response that followed in the next few hours from the police and the medical emergency teams can best be described as different wheels of a well-oiled machinery rolling in near-perfect coordination. With the task at hand involving post-terror attack handling, the responsible agencies were set to follow a well-rehearsed drill.   

To begin with, the Metropolitan Police in a statement acknowledged the incident as a terror attack but stayed away from ‘any speculation’ beyond the confirmed facts. The area of the attack — bang in the heart of London flanked by the symbolic Big Ben, the Parliament, and the London Eye on either side — was cordoned off to allow the emergency teams to operate. Anyone with any information about the attack was asked to report on the anti-terrorist hotline and media was asked to exercise restraint. Public safety was the top priority of the authorities.

A terror attack by ‘lone wolves’ or by individuals inspired by extremist ideologies of the IS was anticipated in Britain for some time. The IS did claim the assailant as a ‘soldier of the Islamic State’ in a released statement but beyond this, it did not try to cash in on the first attack in the UK. As Assistant Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley put it, “this is a day that we planned for but hoped would never happen. Sadly, it has now become a reality.” Online supporters and fanboys of IS on multiple occasions have circulated Photoshopped images of London burning and warned the city as a next target through phoney slogans saying “We are coming”.  

And when the attack did take place, different emergency agencies including the Met Police, Scotland Yard, the ambulance service, and fire brigade effectively followed the set drill. The exemplary coordination and a state of preparedness to handle post-terror attack scenarios by the British authorities foiled the terrorist group’s attempt to spread fear and threat with a strong defiant spirit. London mayor Sadiq Khan succinctly warned that terrorist attacks have become “part and parcel” of life in a major city. The reality is, even with the help of a robust intelligence and vigilant security force, not all terror attacks can be averted. What can be done though, is to stay prepared to handle the following crisis: a thorough investigation to bring the perpetrators to justice, learn lessons, plug loopholes in security, and maintain a public state of security.

Now cut to less than a fortnight before the London attack. On the morning of March 7, a low-intensity IED blast was triggered in a passenger train in Madhya Pradesh — a day before the last phase of polling in Uttar Pradesh. What followed was a wildfire of suspicion that IS attackers had struck in India. But instead of reassuring the public, the police agencies involved claimed that IS had directed a train blast in India, with no evidence to back the claim. And then came the arrests of three suspects and an operation to flush out the fourth accomplice holed up in a residential neighbourhood in Lucknow. This led the over-enthusiastic police to pre-emptively announce the men to be members of the Lucknow-Kanpur module of IS Khorasan — an administrative wing of the IS operating from the border provinces of Afghanistan-Pakistan.

Based on the IS propaganda videos and online literature — easily available for download on the web — in one of the seized laptops of the suspects and intelligence shared by other state and central agencies, the UP police shared its ‘presumptions’ as confirmed facts in a press note circulated to the media. The IS tag suddenly upped the threat quotient of the Lucknow operation, providing a perfect cover to the trigger-happy UP police to conduct an “encounter”. Instead of pacifying and reassuring the residents, an ATS officer provided running commentary during the operation, confirming to the TV media that the suspect was a member of the dreaded IS group. According to police, all attempts to catch the lone armed suspect alive or to make him surrender failed and he had to be shot down at the end of a 13-hour operation, even as TV cameras rolled in full glare within the premises of action. The recovery of the black flag of IS from the room of the man, identified as Saifullah, was a perfect alibi to defend the encounter.

The folly of the UP police in its attempt to claim credit in neutralising the alleged dreaded terror module unravelled less than 24 hours later as ADG (law and order) Daljeet Chaudhary retracted his statement with specific details of IS Khorasan and replaced it with a more generic one of self-radicalised youth. “We do not have any evidence to link them with any group, there are many youth who read extremist material and literature available on the web and are inspired to act violently,” he said in a press conference. Recognising that the UP police had jumped the gun in taking credit, the Ministry of Home Affairs — in charge of internal security — let it know that it was unhappy with the police response in handling the anti-terror operation. Home Minister Rajnath Singh went one step further in his statement to Parliament by not naming any terror group responsible for the blast, until the investigation was complete.

The handling of Lucknow ops and the Ujjain train blast falls in the series of misadventures by the police and intelligence agencies when it comes to terror attacks. Instead of integrating intelligence from various sources, the police speculated on their background and propagated half-baked information. The few minutes of spotlight on its heroic act aside, the actions of the authorities served as a grim reminder that Indian cities and agencies on the ground are deftly inept in handling a modern-day terror attack. Forget the set-drill or swift coordination as displayed in London, where the aftermath was handled with calm-headed professionalism and humanity, India is yet to prepare the blueprint of ‘how to handle a terror attack’. Perhaps, the response to the London attack can be a guide which can come in handy for the Indian police.