Residents have spoken of their shock after being told that their villages have been identified as potential “high-risk launch sites” for extremists wanting to fire rockets at planes taking off and landing at Heathrow.
Officers from the Metropolitan Police’s specialist aviation security team have been touring village halls with a surface-to-air rocket launcher and video footage of a missile hitting a plane in Iraq. Similar briefings have been held near other airports around the country.
Police have invested tens of thousands of pounds in software to identify potential missile launch sites in recent years and have shown residents maps with red and orange dots pinpointing the most likely location for terrorist attacks.
James Nicholls, an Effingham resident who was invited to a briefing at Ockham village hall last month, said: “It was extraordinary, I couldn’t believe it.
“We were asked to look for people burying things in the ground, we were shown all the components of this heat-seeking shoulder-launched missile. They told us they had been as far as Windsor and Sunningdale surveying and looking at potential sites.”
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