“The Bullring Shopping Centre was today revealed as one of 26 possible terror targets in Birmingham and the West Midlands. The report warned that Birmingham was the first British city targeted by al-Qaida, after jobless waiter Moinul Abedin planned to bomb the city centre”.
Apart from the fact that it doesn’t take Columbo to work out that it’s pretty likely that if a terrorist was going to be planning an attack in Birmingham, the Bullring is about as high profile a target as it gets, the casual reader might be especially alarmed at reading this, thinking twice about whether to nip down to Selfridges today for their Yo Sushi! lunch.
That is, if they hadn’t read a few lines further down the page:
“Abedin, aged 27, was arrested in November 2000 and jailed for 20 years after being convicted of doing an act with intent to cause an explosion”.
ie, the ‘revelation’ that the Bullring was on a list of terror targets is that the list was compiled – and the compiler convicted – when the target in question was just about to be demolished anyway, a full three years before the present building which most people would be fearing for was opened.
Here in the social media world, we tend to call that sloppy journalism.
I’m not certain which version of the story you are looking at, but this is the intro on the Birmingham Mail site:
“THE Bullring Shopping Centre was today revealed as one of 26 possible terror targets in Birmingham and the West Midlands.
“It is the only landmark identified so far in a new list drawn up by the Home Office and the police as part of a new strategy for tackling international terrorism.
“West Midlands Police has refused to name the 25 other targets.”
It continues:
“Officers from the National Counter Terrorism Security Office, a specialist police department, have run training exercises with 356 Birmingham retailers on what to do if there is a terrorist attack.
They have also provided security advice “to 26 high risk sites (including, for example, the Bull Ring Shopping Centre),” the report says. West Midlands Police would not identify the other 25 sites last night.”
http://www.birminghammail.net/news/top-stories/2009/03/25/bullring-named-as-a-city-terror-target-97319-23228610/
I can only assume there’s some messed-up version of the story on some website somewhere, which is the one you looked at.