LONDON (AP) — Britain is facing a “staggering rise” in assassination attempts on British soil by Russia and Iran as hostile states recruit criminals to “do their dirty work for them,” the head of the U.K. said. domestic intelligence Tuesday. .
MI5 director Ken McCallum said his officers and police have tackled 20 Tehran-backed plots since 2022 and warned that Iran could expand its targets in Britain if Israel attacks in response to Iranian missile fire. The spy chief said spreading conflicts in the Middle East raise the risk “of an increase – or broadening – of Iranian state aggression in the UK”
In a rare public speech outlining the main threats to Britain from both hostile states and terror groups, McCallum said there was also a risk that Israel’s conflicts with Iranian-backed militant groups – Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen – could trigger terror attacks in Britain
The Middle East crisis has not “translated into terrorist violence on a large scale” in Britain, he said, but hostile states, individual attackers and a revived Islamic State group are together creating “the most complex and interrelated connected threat environment we have ever seen’.
The number of state threat investigations conducted by MI5 has increased by 48% in the past year, with Iran, Russia and China the main perpetrators, McCallum told journalists at Britain’s counter-terrorism command center in London.
McCallum said that since the death of Mahsa Amini, who died in Iranian police custody in September 2022 after being detained for allegedly violating the Islamic Republic’s mandatory headscarf law, “we have seen plot after plot here in Britain, in an unprecedented pace and scale.”
He said MI5 and police had responded to 20 potentially deadly Iranian-backed plots since January 2022, up by a third from the 15 the government declared at the end of January.
McCallum said Russian military intelligence was trying to use “arson, sabotage and more” to create “chaos” on the streets of Britain and other European countries.
Both Russia and Iran often turn to criminals, “from international drug traffickers to low-level criminals,” to carry out attacks, he said.
The official terror threat level in Britain is at “substantial”, the middle of a five-point scale, meaning an attack is likely, and since 2017 MI5 and police have disrupted 43 late-stage terror plots.
While about three-quarters of terror plots stem from Islamic extremist ideology and a quarter from the far right, he says those labels “do not fully reflect the dizzying array of beliefs and ideologies we encounter,” drawn from a soup of “online hate.” , conspiracy theories and disinformation,” McCallum said.
He also said there are worrying signs that Islamic State is back, despite the collapse of its self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
McCallum said that “after a few years of taking a back seat, they have resumed efforts to export terrorism.”
“The first 20 years of my career here were full of terrorist threats,” McCallum said. “We now face the consequences of state-sponsored assassination and sabotage plans, against the backdrop of a major European land war.”
