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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
World
Martin Bentham

Three-fold increase in children being investigated for UK terror plots

Britain is facing a resurgent danger of a terrorist attack from Islamic State or Al Qaeda alongside a rise in child radicalisation and growing state threats from Russia and Iran, the head of MI5 said on Tuesday as he warned that his spies had “one of hell of a job” to keep the public safe.

Ken McCallum, MI5’s director general, said a third of the most threatening plots investigated by his spies involved links to the IS and Al Qaeda or others based overseas.

He said at the same time this country had seen a three fold increase in the number of children being investigated for terror plotting with minors now accounting for a third of his spy agency’s cases.

Mr McCallum said other factors contributing to the threat facing Britain included the impact of conflict in the Middle East and extremist material online and warned of the risk of online connections leading to “deadly real-world actions”.

He said other dangers included the threat posed by Russian spies, who he said were on a “sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets” with “arson, sabotage and more”, and Iran, which he said was behind 20 “potentially lethal” plots targeting this country in the past two years.

Mr McCallum said both countries were trying to recruit criminals to carry out “dirty work” for them but warned any who were tempted that they would feel the “the full weight of the national security apparatus down on you” and that would be “a choice you’ll regret.”

Mr McCallum’s stark assessment of the wide-ranging threat facing Britain - which he said was also having to confront Chinese attempts to steal intellectual and commercial secrets - came during a speech in London and will heighten fears that the conflict in Gaza and now Lebanon will give fresh impetus to Islamist extremists in this country and elsewhere.

He said Mi5 was “powerfully alive” to this danger but had yet to see it “translate at scale into terrorist violence”.

But he warned that the terrorist threat was intense nonetheless with 43 UK plots foiled by MI5 and counter-terrorism police since March 2017, including some involving plans to inflict mass murder using explosives or firearms. He said the rising threat from IS and Al Qaeda was the challenge that worried him the most.

“We and our European partners are detecting IS-connected activity in our homelands, which we are moving early to disrupt,” he said. “And Al Qaeda has sought to capitalise on conflict in the Middle East, calling for violent action. To illustrate, over the last month more than a third of our top priority investigations have had some form of connection, of varying strengths, to organised overseas terrorist groups.”

Mr McCallum said recent convictions included a man in Coventry jailed for life last year for designing a 3D-printed armed drone for IS in west Africa and two brothers from Birmingham jailed for attempting to join IS in Afghanistan.

He added: “These cases are not wild outliers. More will be coming through the courts. Organised gr have the numbers and the know-how to carry or inspire horrendous mass casualty attacks.”

On the impact of the conflict in Gaza and now Lebanon, Mr McCallum said “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.”

He added that previous experience suggested that images and distorted views about what was taking place in the Middle East might have a longer-term radicalising effect on young minds in particular.

In conclusion, Mr McCallum said: “MI5 has one hell of a job on its hands. The first twenty years of my career were crammed full of terrorist threats.

“We now face those alongside state-backed assassination and sabotage plots, against the backdrop of a major European land war.”

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