LONDON – Miserable passengers pushed luggage carts through pools of backed-up storm water in tents outside Heathrow Airport on Sunday as hundreds of flights were canceled, some delays dragged on for hours, and one airline executive called on the British government to bring in the army and police to help move passengers.
But as British Home Secretary John Reid announced that the nation would remain on the highest possible level of alert and warned another attempted attack in Britain was “highly likely,” no let-up to the exhaustive inspections was in sight.
British police are holding 23 suspects – most of them London-based Muslim men in their 20s – in connection with an alleged terrorist plot unveiled last week to blow up as many as 10 airliners leaving Britain and bound for the United States by smuggling liquid explosives onto the passenger jets.
He confirmed that counterterrorism officials were actively monitoring as many as two dozen “major conspiracies” and had foiled at least four “major plots” since attacks on the London transport system in July 2005 killed 52 people.
A British anti-terrorism official said authorities had two concerns: that the arrested plotters could have confederates still at large who might attempt a strike, and that other, unconnected militant groups might seize the moment to attempt an attack.
For the fourth straight day, the most visible sign of Britain’s heightened state of alert was at its airports.
Nearly a third of the flights out of Heathrow, the country’s main airport, were canceled Sunday. The airport handles about 1,250 flights a day.
Security officials hand-searched every passenger, which created four times the normal workload and caused lines of passengers to stretch out of the terminal.
People were prohibited from bringing any hand luggage onto the airplanes, and some flights left without passengers who couldn’t arrive in time, said British Airports Authority spokesman Duncan Bonfield.
“As yet we’ve had no indication whatsoever from the government about how long it’s going to go on,” Bonfield said.
By Sunday afternoon, Heathrow became a netherworld of chaos as airport officials struggling to prevent gridlock inside the terminals consigned early-arriving passengers to rain-soaked tents outside.
David Hashemi, a Los Angeles engineer returning from vacation in Iran, said he was told Saturday that his Virgin Airways flight was canceled. He phoned for updates all afternoon from his hotel, only to find out later that the flight had departed on schedule, but from a different London airport, Gatwick.
“You get here and you’re just walking around in the rain and don’t know where to go. Everyone’s standing around confused,” Hashemi said.
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