LONDON — Britain’s top counterterrorism official resigned Thursday after committing an embarrassing breach of security that forced police to prematurely mount a sting operation against suspected al-Qaida plotters.
Bob Quick, an assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, apologized for having potentially jeopardized “a major counterterrorism operation” when he was photographed and filmed Wednesday carrying top-secret documents in plain view.
Clutched under his right arm as he arrived at 10 Downing Street for a prime ministerial briefing was a memo, titled “Operation Pathway,” whose contents about an ongoing terrorist investigation were clearly legible on camera.
Hours later, police fanned out across northwest England and arrested a dozen men in armed raids that, in some cases, occurred in public places in daylight, terrifying bystanders. Police said that 11 of the 12 detainees were Pakistani nationals, some of them in Britain on student visas.
Peter Fahy, chief constable of the Greater Manchester Police, said Thursday that the sting was planned before Quick’s blunder and would have occurred within 24 hours of when police were forced to act.
Police have divulged no further details about the suspects or what exactly led to their arrests, although the size and complexity of the sting, which involved hundreds of officers, suggests that the men had been under surveillance for some time. There were unconfirmed reports Thursday that authorities suspected a large-scale attack to be in the final stages of planning, perhaps a bombing on a nightclub or shopping center.
“We’re dealing with a very big terrorist plot. We’ve been following it for some time,” Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the British Broadcasting Corp. “We had to act pre-emptively to ensure the safety of the public.”
Quick, a 30-year police veteran, acknowledged his blunder in a statement, saying he regretted “the disruption caused to colleagues undertaking the operation” and was “grateful for the way in which they adapted quickly and professionally to a revised time-scale.”
Pressure on Quick to atone for his mistake began to build immediately after the photographs of him hit the newscasts Wednesday. In a country where the threat of terrorist attack is a constant worry, politicians and other commentators were aghast over what happened.
Opposition spokesman Chris Grayling of the Conservative Party called it a “quite extraordinary” lapse by Quick that had put a “huge question mark over his judgment.”
“If our most senior counterterrorism officer can’t be trusted not to expose highly secret information like this in a public place, then who on Earth can be?” Grayling told the BBC.
Boris Johnson, London’s mayor, called Quick an experienced officer whose resignation he accepted with “great reluctance and sadness.”
Still, there was some glee over the resignation among Conservatives who had not forgiven Quick for his involvement last November in the brief arrest of a Conservative lawmaker and the search of his office as part of an investigation into leaks of sensitive information. Legislators of all political stripes denounced Quick for authorizing a violation of the traditional sanctity of parliamentary offices.
But Johnson, who is a Conservative, insisted that “there was absolutely no kind of witch hunt or effort to get him out” after Wednesday’s blunder.
“I think what people perhaps felt was that … an operation that was very, very sensitive and important for counterterrorism, for rounding up terrorists, had been potentially compromised,” Johnson said on British radio. “And there was obviously a real difficulty there.”
Quick’s successor, John Yates, is also considered an intelligent and able officer but has no counterterrorism experience. Yates is best-known for leading the “cash-for-honors” inquiry in 2006, an investigation into whether lawmakers promised peerages — knighthood and the like — to big political donors. No charges ever arose from the inquiry.
Wednesday’s sting operation focused mostly on the two large northern cities of Liverpool and Manchester. One of the suspects was arrested on the campus of a Liverpool university, panicking students inside the library who watched armed police force the man to lie face down on the ground.
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