The Marmot’s Hole

As security around major national facilities is strengthened due to the increased terrorist threat, police stand guard outside an armored vehicle at Incheon International Airport on Monday. It was the first time in the three years since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that an armored vehicle has been deployed at Incheon Airport./Yonhap News

Uri Party lawmaker Choe Seong (a very nice man who I actually did some work for in grad school) claimed Tuesday that Korea has been the target of terrorist attention 13 times since 1994. He made the claims, which were based on data from local intelligence agencies and overseas terrorism specialists, during a National Assembly Unification, Diplomacy and Trade Committee parliamentary inspection session on the Foreign Ministry. Citing claims by Neil Herman, who headed the task force that looked into the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, Choe said one of the 11 airliners flying from Asia to the U.S. that al-Qaeda operative Ramzi Yousef planned to detonate over the Pacific Ocean as part of Operation Bojinka was a San Francisco-bound flight out of Seoul. In 1995, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, al-Qaeda’s No. 3 man, boarded a flight from Manila to Seoul in order to check out airport security, and in 1999, a-Qaeda military chief Mohammed Atef ordered terrorist Nijar Nawar (name romanized from Korean) to infiltrate Korea.

Choe also said that in August and September of 2001, al-Qaeda operatives infiltrated Korea on intelligence gathering missions, and in October 2003, an al-Qaeda operative got on a ship from New Zealand that entered the port of Gunsan.

Choe said, “Even before the Kim Sun-il incident, Korea was a terrorist target, and there is great concern that a terrorist attack may be launched against Korea in the near future.”

As if the North Koreans weren’t enough to worry about…