Monday, April 18 2005 11:34 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

London: Painting an alarming picture, the British police today (Apr 18, 2005) warned that terrorist outfit al-Qaeda was planning to target the country and called for new stringent laws to tackle such conspiracies.

"There's real clarity now that al-Qaeda affiliates are targeting Britain," Sir Ian Blair, Commissioner of the Metropolitan police, said as reports claimed that a poison ricin attack planned by al-Qaeda operative Kamel Bourgass was aimed at the busy Heathrow Express rail link.

Blair's warning came days after Bourgass, an Algerian who had been linked to al-Qaeda, was given a 17-year prison term for killing a Special Branch Detective Constable and plotting to spread poison ricin on British streets.

"How does the legal system deal with cases of this sort?" I think there will be a number of questions to be asked about whether the law is quite right. The way that al-Qaeda operates is in a sense of very loose knit conspiracies," he said.

"The way English law has developed is, it doesn't like conspiracies. It likes actual offences.

"And where one person does something and another person does another thing but it's only when they add up that they become a conspiracy... I think we're going to have to just look again to see whether there is some other legislation around acts preparatory to terrorism, or something of that nature - that's what we'll have to do," he said.

The Metropolitan police today revealed that Bourgass was targeting the rail link between central London and Heathrow Airport. "The plan was to place ricin, a fast-acting and potentially lethal home-made poison, on hands rails and lavatories on the trains," The Telegraph reported.