A civilian member of Metropolitan Police Service staff, Thomas Lund-Lack, was arrested last night in connection with the leaking of information to a reporter.
Lund-Lack is due to appear at Westminster Magistrates Court today, charged with breaches of the Official Secrets Act and misconduct. He is claimed to have passed an intelligence report claiming that Al Qaeda was planning a UK attack on "a par with Hiroshima and Nagasaki" to the Sunday Times.
The Sunday Times ran a story to this effect on 22 April, claiming that it had been passed a report compiled by JTAC (Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre).
Even by the woeful standards of the current generation of terror scares, this story set new standards for implausibility. If this really is the sort of thing JTAC reports say, then we're in deep doo and the spooks have pretty well abandoned all attempts to maintain narrative integrity.
The alleged report was said to claim that Al Qaeda (Sunni, Arab) was "active in Iran" (Shiite, Iranian) and was planning "large scale" terrorist attacks on Britain and other western targets "with the help of supporters in Iran". The Sunday Times makes a passing nod to the infinite implausibility of this double act by saying there is "no evidence of a formal relationship between Al-Qaeda, a Sunni group, and the Shi’ite regime of President Mah-moud Ahmadinejad" but "experts suggest that Iran's leaders may be turning a blind eye to the terrorist organisation's activities."
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