Authorities in the city of Las Vegas have been accused of ignoring terror threats in case they scare away tourists.
According to a report in The Times, al-Qaeda members made videotapes of several Las Vegas casinos to be considered as bombing targets, with one saying that the “brothers” were going to destroy “the city of Satan”.
The tapes were discovered during recent raids on suspected terrorists in Spain and the United States.
But, the newspaper reports, FBI agents were more or less ignored by local officers, members of the joint terrorism task force and the local mayors office when they tried to warn them of the dangers, refusing to attend a meeting to discuss the contents of the videotapes.
An assistant US attorney is quoted as saying: “The reason for the low turnout was liability – that if they heard this information they would have to act on it. It was outrageous.”
The newspaper further reports that the Las Vegas mayor expressed concern that if such tapes were made public, they would have a “deleterious effect on the Las Vegas tourism industry”.
Report by Tim Gillett, News From Abroad
