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Britain is facing the most daunting threat in its history, as Russia’s intelligence agency is determined to generate “sustained mayhem” on the country’s streets, the head of MI5 has said. In a briefing at MI5’s counter-terrorism operations centre in London, the director general Ken McCallum revealed there have been 20 Iran-backed plots since 2022, while at home, a total of 43 late-stage plots to commit “mass murder” have been foiled since 2017, involving firearms and explosives. He warned that the security service’s counter-terrorism work mostly involved Islamic extremism and extreme right-wing terrorism, but added there were a “dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies” MI5 had to counter.
McCallum stated that the complex mix of terror-related threats and those from nation states meant MI5 had “one hell of a job on its hands”. He said terrorist threats faced during the first 20 years of his career there had now been compounded by state-backed assassination and sabotage plots, set against the backdrop of a major European land war. In the past year, the number of state-threat investigations by MI5 had risen by 48%, he added.
The threat the country faced had been potentiated by the internet, and McCallum pointed out a high proportion of such threats was made up of “lone individuals indoctrinated online”. He said a minority of “anonymous online connections” led to deadly actions, and sorting out the “real plotters from armchair extremists” was not an easy task.
He also acknowledged his concern that a significant number of young people were being drawn into online extremism. In the last three years, 13% of those investigated for terrorism had been under 18, constituting a threefold rise. McCallum spoke of MI5’s challenge to handle “volatile, would-be terrorists with only a tenuous grip of ideologies”. He called, therefore, for a greater pool of resources to assist in MI5’s fight against unprecedented threats
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