Met carry out major anti-terror exercise across London
Exercise Strong Tower will involve 1,000 police officers and is intended to test the Metropolitan Police's ability to cope with a 'marauding terror attack' on the capital
The Metropolitan Police will conduct its largest ever exercise to prepare for a “marauding terrorist attack” on the streets of London.
The operation, which will involve more than 1,000 officers, many of them armed, will test how Scotland Yard and the other emergency services would respond in the face of a jihadist assault on sites across the capital.
Exercise Strong Tower has been planned since January and is not taking place in response to last week’s terrorist attacks.
But the timing, coming just days before the 10th anniversary of the July 7 attacks, is intended to reassure the public that the Met is well prepared to respond to any major incident in London.
The exercise will take place at different sites across the capital including at the disused underground station at Aldwych close to the Strand.
Deputy Assistant Police Commissioner Maxine de Brunner said: “This exercise is focused in the extreme end of what might happen.
“I would just like to stress to you all, it is not being carried out in response to any specific intelligence.
“We have been planning this since January so it is completely not related to anything that may be going on at this time.
“We have been planning this for many months and as it is a live play exercise some of our activity will be highly visible and audible to the public.”
She went on: “We don't want the public to be concerned about what we are doing. Elements of it will be noisy and it will be visible in places and really important we get a message out of reassurance.
“Officers will have to respond on how they find it on the day. They don't know what will be happening and we will be testing things which we haven't tested before.
“We want to test ourselves. This isn't about how to look good or do well. I expect there will be a lot for us to learn from this. We will test our firearms capability across a range of our units.
“Sadly London is no stranger to terrorism and we, alongside out colleagues have to deal with the tragic events of July 2005.
“From our point of view of the Met police we haven't put together an exercise of this magnitude before. It is the largest exercise in London that we have planned.
“We want to see and ensure that our capacity and skills can match whatever we think a terrorist group may do.”
She added: “Exercising is a vital part of our preparedness to respond to any major incident in London. It helps us to ensure that we and all our partners are ready as we can before whatever might happen.
“We put a huge amount of effort into our planning and the exercise it to test out assumptions and how a large number of agencies all work together.”
The exercise will take place across multiple sites in the capital involving London's emergency services and transport, the Government, hospitals and the Ministry of Defence.
