A terrorist attack in Paris in January last year left 17 people dead and another 130 were killed in November. A truck driver ploughed into a crowd in Nice two weeks ago leaving 84 dead and 303 injured. The killings by axe, gun, knife and bomb in Munich, Ansbach, Reutlingen and Wurzburg, in Germany, left 12 dead and 59 injured. And now a priest was stabbed to death in Normandy.

People are naturally alarmed and fearful for their lives all over Europe. Malta is not immune from such a reaction.

The other day, Opposition leader Simon Busuttil questioned in a radio interview “Malta’s preparedness for a terrorist attack”. Such talk is not likely to be helpful to calming people’s understandable fears in the wake of the latest atrocities. Which is not to say that people should not be alerted to such situations.

Indeed, as leader of the Opposition and as a member of the Security Committee, Dr Busuttil has every right, and the duty, to question the Prime Minister about Malta’s intelligence and possible preparedness against threats to security. It might, however, have been more prudent to use this avenue to find out how matters stand and then put people’s minds at rest.

The ability of even the most sophisticated security services to provide up-to-date intelligence to prevent the kind of atrocity perpetrated in France, where fatal intelligence failures have occurred, or Germany, where attackers appear to have mostly acted alone, has become extremely difficult.

Malta’s location at the southern-most tip of Europe, close to the failed State of Libya and on the migration route from North Africa, makes the island vulnerable. We face a range of possible dangers.

The infiltration of terrorists into Malta as a stepping stone into Europe to mount a terrorist attack against a target in one of the major European capitals cannot be discounted. The lone jihadist or a small cell bent on attacking some high profile personality in Malta as a proxy for other EU targets is the kind of threat we must be prepared to counter.

Preparedness against terrorism requires several tools. The prime defence is good security intelligence. It is the centrepiece of successful counter-terrorism. The ability to expose terrorist networks or to pre-empt attacks is the central purpose of good peacetime intelligence.

Is Malta prepared? The country’s security services are inevitably limited in capability. They possess little technical capacity to carry out mass meta-data surveillance of potential terrorists. We must hope that the Maltese government’s liaison with friendly intelligence services is close and that we are fully plugged in to intelligence-sharing through Europol. There is no reason to think this is not the case.

Our resources in surveillance and military and police forces, although limited in size, must go hand in hand with coordinated and rehearsed contingency plans to deploy well-trained quick reaction forces in an emergency. There must be increased vigilance at sea and air borders to guard against any attempted infiltration by terrorists under the guise of refugees or visitors from North Africa or the Middle East.

In these uncertain times, it is the paramount duty of the government to calm people’s genuine fears and natural concerns.

There is a need to encourage citizens to be alert but not alarmed.

The Prime Minister and the Minister for Home Affairs have a duty to inform everybody of the state of the country’s preparedness to counter the kind of eventualities that have caused such alarm and mayhem in other countries in Europe.

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