UK Closes Lima Embassy After Terror Alert

Britain shut its embassy in Peru yesterday because of an unspecified security threat in the jittery New Year's Eve period. There were curbs on some flights over New York and other American cities, and Rome. Some streets were closed around a military hospital in Hamburg.

British officials declined to expand on the source of the potential threat in the Peruvian capital, Lima, except to say that it appeared to be directed against the buildings rather than diplomats or other British citizens. No other country has shut its Lima embassy.

The Foreign Office said its travel advice for visitors to Peru remained unchanged.

In the US the sky above New Year's Eve revellers in Times Square in New York, the Strip in Las Vegas and the Chicago city centre will be off-limits to charter flights and smaller leisure aircraft today, but not to commercial and military flights.

Warplanes would patrol overhead, the department of homeland security said.

Hamburg police reported receiving a tip-off from a US intelligence agency that Islamist extremists planned to attack a German military hospital in the suburb of Wandsbek with a car bomb.

Hamburg's senior security official, Dirk Nockemann, said the information pointed to Ansar al-Islam, a group based in northern Iraq which US officials believe has links to al-Qaida.

The skies over Rome will be off-limits to certain aircraft as part of a heightened watch, the Italian authorities said.

Italy halted flights over the capital by small aircraft from December 24 until last Monday, and has extended the ban until January 6. Military and commercial flights are exempt from the restrictions.

A spokesman for the British Foreign Office described the Lima embassy closure as a temporary measure.

It applied to yesterday and today, but the embassy is not expected to re-open until next week because January 1 and 2 are public holidays.

The FO website warned of domestic terrorism in Peru, despite the defeat of the Shining Path guerrilla movement a decade ago. A bomb close to the US embassy in Lima in March 2002, blamed on Shining Path remnants, killed 10 Peruvians.

The capture of the Shining Path's leader, Abimael Guzman, in 1992 dramatically cut the group's activities. But after months of inactivity the attack on the US embassy, three days before President George Bush was due to visit Peru last year, was a signal that it might be trying to make a comeback.

In December 1996 a dozen Tupac Amaru rebels occupied the Japanese embassy in Lima, seizing more than 400 diplomats and Peruvian dignitaries and holding many of them hostage for four months.

The Philippines yesterday paraded two American brothers it suspects of having links to Muslim militants. James Stubbs, 56, a Muslim convert who is married to a Filipina, and Michael Ray Stubbs, 55, were arrested on December 13 and would be deported soon, officials said.

"They have been meeting elements of terrorist organisations here," Andrea Domingo, the Philippines' immigration commissioner, said. She said some of the groups had been used to channel funds to Philippine militants affiliated to al-Qaida.

"Nobody's telling me anything, " James Stubbs shouted to reporters at the navy headquarters in Manila as Ms Domingo spoke.

"They're just saying we're undesirables," he said after armed guards brought in the brothers in handcuffs and yellow T-shirts emblazoned with "detainee".