The plot to blow up the Eiffel Tower was uncovered through intercepted phone calls
A plot by Islamic terrorists to blow up the Eiffel Tower has been uncovered.
A scrambled short-wave radio conversation exposing the planned attack on the world’s most visited monument was picked up by Portuguese air traffic controllers and passed on to French spy chiefs.
The 1,060ft high tower has more than six million visitors a year – an average of more than 16,000 a day.
A successful strike on the 7,500 ton iron tower, which was looked down on Paris since 1889, would be a French 9/11 and could cost thousands of lives.
The threat was uncovered in a “vague and muffled” radio conversation picked up by air traffic controllers in Lisbon on Thursday. It comes after a spate of other threats made in recent days on the websites linked to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terror network, calling for the “brothers of Islam to strike Paris”.