John O'Connor

John O'Connor

John O'Connor former Scotland Yard detective.John’s career with the Metropolitan Police Force spanned 30 years, operating in the Murder, Counterfeit Currency and Fraud Squads. Most of his service was spent in the Criminal Investigations Department (CID). John ran the Flying Squad at New Scotland Yard dealing with all armed robberies in London until retiring with the rank of Commander. He has been found on television on many occasions to have commented about the incapacity of so called terrorists/those suspected of terrorism. For example in one website while being referred to as a 'TV talking head'. he is quoted as saying on CNN

"This was a hopeless, incompetent terrorist attack, I mean when you see the ludicrous situation when none of the bombs were able to be detonated and these guys are then trying to set fire to petrol.All they got was a bonfire, they set fire to fuel - well that in its own way is not going to detonate the gas cylinders and it's not going to cause an explosion - it was just a fire, I mean that is so incompetent as to be almost laughable."

To him in that article the perpetrators of the attack should have been referred to as "jihadists" rather than Al-Qaeda.

On CBC-TV News, he goes on to say, in July 2005 when referring to the suspected London Bombers

"The four suspected bombers arrested by British and Italian police are "dopey" and "not very bright" and will prove to be an intelligence gold mine" "They were so unprofessional, and not at all like the religious militants found in the Middle East"

The four, who he said drank, smoked dope and womanized, in contrast with the austere life of religiously motivated attackers, were susceptible to suggestion by their recruiters.

"So they will be easy for interrogators to break down", O'Connor had said."That means the planners and bomb-makers, who assumed the four would die in suicide attacks on the London transit system on July 21, "must be quaking in their boots." "The capture of the four men is a break for the police, who need to arrest the planners to stop further attacks" he said.

For LateLine ABC O'Connor then goes on to talk about the 7/7 bombing and says

"odd thing is that the police have announced none of the suspects that have been arrested so far are of British nationality. That's a real surprise because the last rounds of terrorist activity under the umbrella of Al Qaeda had been British-born Pakistani young men who have taken part in some of the terrible atrocities we've seen in the UK" "Now, we have people that are coming in from abroad but the interesting thing is we know that two of them are doctors. One who has been described as the leader of it is a neurologist - practising medical people, professional men of high intelligence and yet they've put themselves in a situation where they've acted as literally street terrorists. And I just find it very difficult to understand how if these were working under the directions of any strategists in Al Qaeda, how on Earth they would use people of that quality to be disposed of as street terrorists."

"One would have thought as medical practitioners over here, not on the radar of the security services or the police, one would have suspected that they could have done far more damage in their professional capacity. They're going to have access to all kinds of materials where they could pose a public health threat if they so desired. To see these people perform the way they have done in a very amateurish and crude way - bear in mind that none of these devices have worked and the quality of the car bombs, although the material was there to cause an awful lot of destruction, the construction of the weapons really wasn't up to it. It lacked commercial or military explosives to act as a precursor. They themselves didn't have firearms.One looks at it and thinks, 'Well, this is so amateurish, it's difficult to believe it could have been directed by anybody'. It's almost as though it was an enterprise conducted by individuals who may have great sympathy with the aims of Al Qaeda and the aims of Islamic extremists, but they don't seem to have any sense or professionalism as acting as terrorists."

When it was revealed that British police had failed to arrest a suspected war criminal, Israeli Major General Doron Almog, tbecause they feared an armed confrontation with Israeli air marshals, O'Connor told BBC One's Breakfast programme: "All they needed to do was to stop the plane from taking off and negotiate through the Foreign Office." He said he felt the arrest had been "written off", putting "British justice is in the dock."