Pandor: We must ensure intelligence agencies able to deal with terror threats

With Saturday marking 20 years since the 9/11 terror attack on the US, International Relations and Cooperation Minister Naledi Pandor said that it was extremely important that countries, including South Africa’s intelligence agencies, were capable of picking up potential threats.

In 2001, extremist group al-Qaeda hijacked four airplanes and carried out suicide attacks, crashing into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon outside Washington D.C and Shanksville in Pennsylvania.

Nearly 3,000 people died during the attacks while thousands of injured people were trapped under the rubble for days.

Remembering this day, Pandor said that the world needed to make sure that countries had security structures to pick up and deal with any possible terror attacks in the future said.

“I think we should return to multilateralism, to using global institutions such as the United Nations. Knowing that there are such groupings in the world, we must also make sure that our intelligence machinery is up to the par to protect us and provide us with the early warning and ensure we can withstand such groupings.”

Source: Ewn