India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

A terrifying royal Olympic security scandal was exposed by British tabloid Daily Star just weeks before the launch of the Games. Hours after six terror suspects were arrested amid fears they were targeting the event, one the tabloid’s reporters sidestepped a massive security operation and slipped into the stand where Princess Anne will watch her show-jumper daughter ZaraPhillips compete. The Princess Royal, a former European eventing champion, is among a list of VIPs expected at Greenwich Royal Park stadium in south-east London later this month. The reporter has claimed in his report that had he been a bomber, posing as a builder and clutching a rucksack, he would have had more than enough time to plant a device and set a long-term timer. The reporter later Games bosses a taste of their worst nightmare, a devastating royal terror spectacular. Wearing steel toe-capped boots, a high visibility vest and a hard hat – but no ID tag – he evaded 18 security checkpoints and CCTV cameras to scale an unmanned eight-foot high fence in broad daylight. He sailed past a team of construction workers, strolled up a set of stairs and entered a maze of unfinished rooms at the back of the stadium’s West Stand. He sat at the top of the stand for 20 minutes, looking under seats and opening my rucksack. I took pictures, answered a phone call and waved at our photographer on the Royal Observatory hill. He was not stopped once, or questioned. I then slipped out of the stand, across the show jumping arena and out through one of the checkpoints. I even had the time to pose for a picture with an 8.50-pound-an-hour Gurkha guard, one of more than 23,000 hired by top security firm G4S to man the gates. I later asked a construction worker how secure the site was. He said: “There’s fencing and around 20 gates but the security is pretty lax, to be honest.”

UK tabloid exposes terrifying royal Olympic security scandal