Armed attack highlights athletes' vulnerability

A second armed attack in the space of a year on a bus carrying a national sports team has highlighted the vulnerability of top-level athletes and the publicity such ambushes attract.

Two members of Togo's football delegation died when gunmen attacked the team bus on Friday as it travelled to the African Nations Cup in Angola. The driver was killed in the assault.

Last March gunmen killed seven people in an attack on the Sri Lanka cricket team's bus in Lahore. Six of the team were injured.

As a result Pakistan are now effectively a cricket team without a country and will play all their fixtures abroad for the foreseeable future.

The Angola attack, which has resulted in Togo captain Emmanuel Adebayor announcing on Sunday his players will return home, has focussed unwelcome attention on the soccer World Cup in five months' time.

South Africa, which has already successfully staged rugby and cricket World Cups, will be the first African nation to host the world's second biggest sports festival after the Olympic Games.

On Saturday chief World Cup organiser Danny Jordaan dismissed any comparison with the Nations Cup at the start of a momentous year for African soccer.

"To say what happened impacts on the World Cup in South Africa is the same as suggesting that when a bomb goes off in Spain, it threatens London's ability to host the next Olympics," he said.

LITMUS TEST

However Sajjan Gohel, the international security director of the Asia-Pacific Foundation, a London-based think tank, said many people had been looking to the Angola tournament as a litmus test for the World Cup.

"Although it is not in South Africa, it is in southern Africa so I suppose many people were looking at it in a similar light," Gohel said on Sunday.

"We have seen the fact terrorism can cause problems to sports events. Pakistan have become sporting pariahs, nobody plays there."

Gohel said the magnitude of the soccer World Cup makes it an attractive target for militants seeking maximum publicity.

"For the last three World Cups terrorist groups have thought about carrying out an attack but they haven't been successful, they have had their own logistical and technical problems," he said.

"It would be totally naive to assume South Africa would be either immune or exempt from it. It is very worrying sporting events are being hijacked in this way."

The major headache for organisers is the ease with which a sporting event can be disrupted even if the attacks do not go according to plan.

A soccer World Cup is also logistically easier to target because it is not confined to one city as are the summer and winter Olympics.

Security is going to be a major problem at the New Delhi Commonwealth Games in October following the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008 which killed around 166 people.

An England badminton team withdrew from the world championships in Hyderabad and the Australian Davis Cup tennis side refused to play in Chennai.

"I believe the threat to the Commonwealth Games is very serious because we saw how the Mumbai gunmen were able to hold an entire city hostage for several days," Gohel said.

"We saw how it created panic, it captured the headlines, it precipitated fear we haven't seen since the 9/11 attacks, it was being beamed into our homes from the international media.

"Even a smaller attack up to a month before the Games will create problems for the authorities because there will be panic, countries like Australia and England will start panicking whether they can send their teams."

Image: Togolese government officials and relatives receive the remains of Togolese assistant soccer coach Amalete Abalo in the capital city of Lome on, January 10, 2010.

Photograph: Reuters