Toulouse shooting: the rise of the 'just do it" terrorists In Britain, Awlaki's sermons were blamed for the attack on the Labour MP Stephen Timms at his constituency surgery last May, when Roshonara Choudhry, 21, tried to stab him to death with a kitchen knife. British security officials have also broken up several al-Qaeda plots in which militants were planning to attack crowded shopping centres with primitive explosives. Al-Qaeda's ability to launch large-scale terrorist attacks against the West on the scale of September 11 has been severely diminished as a result of the relentless assault on its command and control centres in southern Afghanistan and Pakistan. Intelligence officials believe that about two thirds of al-Qaeda's original leadership have been killed or captured during the past decade - including Osama bin Laden, the movement's founder Al-Qaeda's terrorist masterminds would still prefer to focus on transatlantic aircraft, commuter trains and transport hubs. Its senior lieutenants have even expressed an interest in detonating "dirty" nuclear bombs in the centres of major financial hubs, such as New York and London, which would have a devastating impact on the global economy. But intelligence experts believe al-Qaeda no longer has the organisational capacity to conduct such attacks. Instead they are focusing their energy on softer targets. The Mumbai terrorist attacks in November 2008, when a gang of al-Qaeda terrorists carried out a series of carefully co-ordinated shootings and bombing attacks, killing 164 people, was seen as the first example of this new tactic. Following this week's atrocities in southern France, British security officials are now concerned that al-Qaeda may be planning similar attack on this summer's Olympic Games in London. It doesn't matter how many anti-aircraft batteries or Typhoon interceptors you have deployed for the Games if a group of al-Qaeda terrorists decide to attack the crowd with home-made bombs, knives and guns.