Black death and al-Qaeda: anatomy of a scare story

Five years on from the Hutton whitewash, the spectre of phoney stories of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is back. Lurid claims about al-Qaeda terrorists falling victim to their own biological weapons have made headlines across the world. But those claims now look like a planted scare story that was exaggerated, at best. Who planted it? And why?

Two weeks ago the Sun newspaper gleefully claimed that "at least 40 al-Qaeda fanatics died horribly" after being struck down with the black death at a forest training camp in Algeria.

The paper named the terrorist group as Al-Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb (AQLIM) led by Abdelmalek Droudkel. It said the incident came to light when security forces found a body by the roadside, but did not say how the figure of 40 deaths was arrived at. "Security sources" claimed that al-Qaeda would be "really worried" by the prospect of terrorists fleeing and either taking the disease with them or surrendering "to escape a horrible death".

The Sun is not where you would usually find a serious counter-terrorism story and exactly how this one got into the hands of journalist Alex West, son of security minister Lord Alan West, is not clear. Unsurprisingly, the younger West has declined to tell The First Post his sources.

Although some of its claims looked a bit far-fetched, the Sun story seemed to have a kernel of truth in it. After all, the micro-organism that causes 'black death' - or bubonic and pneumonic plague - is endemic in wild animals in Algeria.

Nor did the Sun report make any explicit mention of a possible germ warfare angle. But later that day in the US, the Washington Times came up with a different take on the tale: "An al-Qaeda affiliate in Algeria closed a base earlier this month after an experiment with unconventional weapons went awry, a senior US intelligence official said Monday".

The official quoted "spoke on the condition he not be named because of the sensitive nature of the issue". This formulation usually refers to officially sanctioned briefings, so he was deliberately putting the story into the public domain. He dismissed the idea that a naturally occurring plague was involved and said the base had been closed because an unknown chemical or biological substance had leaked. The basis for the story was said to be an intercepted communication from AQLIM to the al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan.

Journalists are regularly fed bogus stories by intelligence sources

By the next day, the Sun had picked up the germ warfare line, proclaiming: "The al-Qaeda cell wiped out by Black Death may have infected ITSELF while developing biological weapons." It had no new detail on the incident but had dug up a former adviser to the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who pointed to existing claims that al-Qaeda is "known to experiment with biological weapons".

Although the two papers are not among the most credible purveyors of serious news, their claims were picked up by media outlets across the world. In Britain, the online Daily Mail and