Some people raised their eyebrows scornfully when the Maltese media warned of the dangers of being complacent in regard to terrorism.

But the allegations made by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, in that the former number three in al-Qaeda planned to use Malta as a staging post to launch a terror attack against the UK, are

worrying, to say the least.

General Musharraf said that Kuwaiti Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was turned over to the US against payment, had been planning to bomb London Heathrow’s fuel depot in 2002.

Mohammed, who was also the alleged mastermind of 9/11, planned to have hijackers take over planes outbound to the UK from places such as Malta, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Romania.

General Musharraf said that al-Qaeda planned to use these countries because of their lax security – something that the airlines of all the countries mentioned have already strongly denied.

But this newspaper’s sister publication published an article some weeks back showing that a passenger had made it on board a flight carrying a drinks bottle and a lighter at the height of the terrorist threat back in August this year. This was in the UK, where the attacks were actually being planned, so it must be said that security can be as tight as you like, but something can always slip through.

In Malta, we always have the “we will not be involved” mentality, thinking that our little rocky refuge will not become part of the global threat that is terrorism.

Well, we have just had a wake up call. Air Malta admitted that it had been approached and told at the time. The fact that we are a small country with limited resources does not make us less of a target, it makes us more of one. When we say a target, we do not necessarily mean that we could have an attack here, but rather that we could be used as a staging post to mount attacks in other countries. Being such a small country, where we do have Arabs who are either living here legally, illegally or even just visiting for a holiday, would make it very hard to track down possible terrorist cells. But hard as it is, we must, like every other Western country, make sure that we remain vigilant and that we do our bit.

We must make sure that our information is up-to-date. One of course recognises that Malta’s security service will be working tirelessly behind the scenes to monitor and share information with their counterparts all over the world.

As a people, we must be prepared for the eventuality, that one of these days, our country might be embroiled in such an attack. It is not a nice thought, but we must bear in mind that we have had incidents here before. There was the Egypt Air hijacking and the murder of Fathi Shqaqi, not to mention the Malta connection in the Pan Am Lockerbie bombing. The world has become a very different place to the one that we knew even just a few years ago. We must accept that everyone has to be more vigilant, and that Malta could be involved by third parties at any time.