London:
Russian intelligence was intent on causing “chaos” in the UK over London’s support for Ukraine, Britain’s domestic intelligence chief said on Tuesday. Ken McCallum also said that MI5 had responded to 20 Iranian-backed plots since January 2022 that posed potentially lethal threats to British citizens and residents of the United Kingdom.
Russia and Iran have turned to hiring criminals and private intelligence to do their work on British soil, he said.
On Russia’s side, Britain should “expect to see continued acts of aggression here at home” with its GRU military intelligence agency on “prolonged missions to generate chaos” on the country’s streets, McCallum said.
“We have seen arson, sabotage and more,” he added.
As for Iran, he said there had been an “unprecedented pace and scale” of plots over the past two years.
As events unfold in the Middle East, MI5 is paying “the utmost attention” to the risk of an increase in Iranian state-backed aggression in the UK, he added.
In total, MI5 and the police have foiled 43 late-stage attack plots since March 2017, saving “numerous lives”, he said, adding: “Some of these plotters were trying to get hold of firearms and explosives in the final days of planning a mass murder’.
In a wide-ranging speech, McCallum also blamed far-right ideologies for the “staggering” rise in the number of children being investigated for terrorism.
People under the age of 18 account for 13 percent of people investigated by the spy agency for possible involvement in terrorist activities, he said.
He told reporters at MI5’s Counter Terrorism Operations Center in London that the number had increased “threefold in the last three years”.
McCallum said the internet was the “biggest factor” driving the rise, describing how easily youngsters could access “inspirational and educational material” from their bedrooms.
He said the intelligence service was seeing “too many cases where very young people are drawn into poisonous online extremism”, singling out “sly” internet memes.
“Far-right terrorism in particular is highly targeted at young people, driven by propaganda that shows a shrewd understanding of online culture,” he added.
“It’s not really a coherent single ideology on the far right, and that’s what skewed the numbers the most.”
The UK’s terror threat level remains ‘significant’ – the third highest out of five – meaning an attack is likely.
McCallum added that the Islamic State group had “renewed its efforts to export terrorism” and that investigations into plots by hostile countries had increased by 48 percent in the past year.
(Except for the headline, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and was published by a syndicated channel.)
