On the edge in jittery UK

Rohit Mahajan

Tribune News Service

London, May 28

The passengers are restive, tired and full of nameless forebodings. We’re at Immigration Control at Heathrow Airport. Less than a week has passed since the Manchester suicide-bombing.

Fear and suspicion hang thick in the air. When their journey started, the passengers were aware that the British intelligence had categorised the security threat in the UK as “critical” — which meant that another terror attack “is expected imminently”.

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During the flight, we’d learnt from the news ticker on our screens that all British Airways flights to and from Heathrow and Gatwick had been suspended due to an “IT failure”. Thousands of passengers have been stranded across the world. Exactly what happened? People don’t know, so they speculate. Some suspect “IT failure” was just an excuse given by the authorities — surely, they reason, an “IT failure” can’t really ground the whole of British Airways! They suspect “IT failure” was actually a cyber-terrorism attack against Britain’s national carrier. Others fear something more sinister — “There may have been a threat of a terror attack against British Airways airplanes,” says Rajeev Garg, a businessman from Delhi, visiting the UK for a holiday for the first time.

“After what happened the other day, I fear there’s going to be a stricter scrutiny of travellers coming into the UK,” says Alex, the American behind me in the massive queue at immigration.

He says “what happened the other day” because he doesn’t want to use the term “suicide-bombing” after getting off a plane that flew in from an Arab country. But there’s no “greater scrutiny” of visitors to the UK. South Asian visitors are relieved at the sight of the ushers directing us to immigration officers — all ushers are Asians.

They send us to the immigration officers who reflect the racial diversity of Great Britain: They are White, Asian, African. There’s a man with prescription Islamic beard, sans moustache; there’s a hijabi woman; there’s an Asian grandma who says she occasionally gets interested in cricket and asks: “Who’s playing?”

Force on streets

But on the streets of London, there are cops with automatic guns, a rarity in the past. In the city’s tourist hubs such as Trafalgar Square or Westminster region, they’re in large numbers. In places where large crowds are likely to gather — such as a cricket ground — they’re conspicuously numerous. Summer in Britain is a time for the outdoors, theatres, concerts and sport. But this one is going to be a summer fraught with danger.