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You know how if you want to fly anywhere and don’t want to check your bags because they’re just gonna abuse and lose them, so you just take carryon, but you need like seven mini bottles of various shampoos and creams and whatnot and if any of them have more than 100ml the security douche totally power trips on you and treats you like you’re gonna use that liquid to drown kittens? That’s because some terrorist asswipes plotted to blow up an airliner using liquid explosives in 2006.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 9, 2006--
James Bond is MI6. They are the spies that go out and wreak havoc and destruction in other countries. The job of MI5 is to catch other spies/terrorists trying to harm the UK. MI5 is also known as the Security Service and MI6 is the Secret Intelligence Service. Anyway, this was an MI5 operation.
In June of 2006 MI5 said hey these Muslims are suspicious so let’s spy on them. What they discovered was an al-Qaeda plot to (probably) blow up several airliners departing Heathrow Airport outside London while en route to the United States and Canada. The bombers would carry ingeniously created liquid bombs disguised as drinks through security and then do a suicide detonation over the Atlantic.
Two weeks prior to the planned attack, on August 9, 2006, British police raided suspected terrorist enclaves in London, Birmingham, and Buckinghamshire, arresting 24 suspects. They found bomb-making equipment and “martyrdom videos” of those who planned to blow themselves up for the greater glory of who fucking cares. But the trial was a clusterfuck. Eight men were charged, and their defense was they were just planning to scare people by blowing up tiny little “nuisance” bombs inside the airport and we really weren’t planning to blow up planes out of the sky we promise. Seven were found guilty of conspiracy to murder/conspiracy to kill, and got lengthy sentences.
In the aftermath, airport security went fucking berserk. Hundreds of thousands of passengers were affected in the chaos, with a ton of canceled flights and banning liquids and making people take their goddamn shoes off. Flights in and out of Heathrow and neighboring Gatwick airports had to be significantly reduced in order to allow security to implement the new screenings. The British government was accused of fear mongering and the airline industry said the baggage restrictions were “ridiculous” and devised by “utter morons.”
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I was flying out of Heathrow the day after the raid. Can confirm security was fucking berserk. Nothing allowed carry-on except boarding pass, and I just left my shoes off because of how often I had to remove them that day. Arrived at 4am for an 8:30am flight, and was not through security in time for the flight. Neither were the pilots, so the flight took off at 9:30am and left half the passengers. Missed my connection in Chicago; bags showed up at my home two weeks later.