Iran may increasingly target Britons in the UK if the war in the Middle East escalates, the head of MI5 warned today.
Director general Ken McCallum issued the stark warnings less than two years after he laid bare the ‘very real threat’ posed by aggression from hostile states including the Islamic republic and Russia, who he said want ‘sustained mayhem’ on British streets.
In a wide-ranging speech, he also highlighted the ‘worsening threat from al Qaeda and in particular from Islamic State’, which he said had ‘resumed efforts to export terrorism’, and said MI5 was ‘powerfully alive’ to the risk that tensions in the Middle East posed to terrorist activity in the UK.
MI5 and the police have disrupted 43 late-stage attack plots since March 2017, he revealed, adding that this had saved ‘numerous lives’.
Turning to Iran, he said there has been an ‘unprecedented pace and scale’ of plots since 2022, posing ‘potentially lethal threats’ to British citizens and UK residents. He said the service had foiled 20 plots by the rogue state since January 2022 which could have posed a lethal threat to UK residents.
Director general Ken McCallum issued the stark warnings less than two years after he laid bare the ‘very real threat’ posed by aggression from hostile states
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei pictured on Friday
Mr McCallum said MI5 was ‘powerfully alive to the risk that events in the Middle East directly trigger terrorist action in the UK’, and while the ‘ripples from conflict in that region will not necessarily arrive at our shores in a straightforward fashion, they will be filtered through the lens of online media and mixed with existing views and grievances in unpredictable ways’.
Speaking at the Counter Terrorism Operations Centre in west London today, the top spy warned MI5 had ‘one hell of a job on its hands’.
‘The first twenty years of my career here were crammed full of terrorist threats,’ he said.
‘We now face those alongside state-backed sabotage and assassination plots, against the backdrop of a major European land war.’
In the last year, the number of state threat investigations run by MI5 has ‘shot up by 48%’, he said.
The spy chief said Russia and Iran had turned to employing criminals and private intelligence officers in the UK to do their work on British soil.
‘The UK’s leading role in supporting Ukraine means we loom large in the fevered imagination of (Russian president Vladimir) Putin’s regime, and we should expect to see continued acts of aggression here at home,’ he said.
‘The GRU (Russian military intelligence) in particular is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets.
‘We’ve seen arson, sabotage and more dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness and having precisely the opposite effect of what the Russian state intends in driving increased operational co-ordination with partners across Europe and beyond.’
Speaking at the Counter Terrorism Operations Centre in west London today, the top spy warned MI5 had ‘one hell of a job on its hands’
Mr McCallum also spoke of his concerns about right-wing extremism in the UK, saying that youngers were being radicalised by ‘canny online memes’.
He said 13% of people being investigated by the security agency for involvement in UK terrorism are under 18.
The internet is driving the trend behind the threefold increase seen in the last three years, he said, adding that extreme right-wing terrorism ‘in particular skews heavily towards young people, driven by propaganda that shows a canny understanding of online culture’.
Alluding to the summer riots, he also spoke of the ‘insidious effect of internet hatred and disinformation has played into threats to election candidates, intimidation of communities, and the public disorder that followed the sickening attack in Southport’.
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