Several terror plots foiled at the last minute in Britain in 2022 were “close calls”, a police chief revealed as he described them as “goal line saves”. Matt Jukes, the head of counter-terrorism policing, said would-be attackers had picked targets and were gathering weapons when officers intervened.
Speaking at a briefing at Scotland Yard on Thursday, Mr Jukes said: “Last year we stopped eight late-stage terror plots. And the reality is that a number of those were close calls, I would describe several of them as goal-line saves.
“These are cases in which a subject had identified their target, had or was acquiring their weapon and where we have intervened to stop that attack taking place.”
The terror threat in the UK “feels a very enduring one”, he said, adding that it had changed over time and “evolved”, to now include “many more self-initiated terrorists than it had in the past.”
“This is making the threat harder to spot, it’s making the individuals harder to stop,” he added.
There are more than 800 live investigations and police have seen calls to the anti-terrorism hotline increase in the last year.
Mr Jukes added that the number of investigations into hostile state threats being carried out by counter-terror police has also "quadrupled" in the last two years. While fighting terrorism is still the “majority” focus, tackling hostile state activity was a “growing part” of work for counter-terror police due the range of threats now faced in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr Jukes told reporters.
He said: “We are shifting, in part, our focus from an exclusive attention to the terrorist threat to a really significant shift in focus on the threat from foreign states. For counter terrorism policing that means, at present, that around 20% of our casework is focused on missions outside terrorism.
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“That means countering state threats, investigating war crimes and working with MI5 and other partners to address espionage.”
The number of investigations focused on state threats has “quadrupled in recent years”, he said, adding that this referred to “dozens” of cases over the last two years, not “hundreds”.
But he stressed how “scores” of officers could be working on hostile state threats because of the “intensity” of the investigations, adding that the nature of the cases was “palpably different” from terror probes.
Last year the boss of MI5 laid bare the “very real threat” posted by hostile states and set out in stark language the dangers from Russia, China and Iran.
The security agency’s director general Ken McCallum revealed in a speech in November that there had been at least 10 potential plots since January last year by Iranian intelligence services to kidnap or kill British or “UK-based” people considered “enemies of the regime”.
Mr Jukes said that number now stands at 15.
