QinetiQ cashes in on US terror fear

QINETIQ, the former Government arms-testing company that now makes James Bond-style weapons and gadgets for the commercial market, is launching a major export drive to the US.

The war on terror has forced America to beef up internal security and QinetiQ hopes its push into the market there will double its turnover of £795.5 million.

The company says it has invented hundreds of devices to help detect and halt terrorists.

QinetiQ chief executive Sir John Chisholm said: 'The US is a huge market for us. In time it will be as big and as important as the UK market.'

When QinetiQ was owned by the Government it was not allowed to export sophisticated technologies, but now it can take advantage of the heightened American security fears.

QinetiQ, which is planning to float, is confident that the Americans will buy the company's new Borderwatch System. This portable high-tech scanner can 'see through' lorries and has already been used in Britain to detect asylum seekers at British ports.

The technical name for the Borderwatch is the Passive Millimetre Wave Imager (PMWI). This can detect the electro-magnetic waves emitted by the human body and other objects. Clothes emit almost no waves, so they effectively disappear when they are scanned by the imager.

Unlike a metal detector, it can detect any hard object, so a knife with a ceramic blade would be revealed, as would a gun made from plastics.

PMWI operates quickly enough to produce instant images, so people and vehicles can be scanned without being stopped, which would be a boon at airports.

According to QinetiQ, the US is also interested in a Spiderman-style spiked sticky net that can safely stop cars within 50 yards. The Pentagon has bought more than 1,000 for use in the US and Iraq.