UK ‘has foiled 31 terror plots in last four years’

(File photo) Police officers wearing face masks stand guard in London, Britain, recently. (REUTERS)

Police and intelligence services have disrupted 31 plots to attack Britain in the last four years, Ken McCallum, director general of the MI5 domestic intelligence agency, said yesterday. The majority of plots were from religious extremists, but a growing number are organised far-right groups, he said. “Even during the pandemic period, we have all been enduring for most of the last two years, we have had to disrupt six late-stage attack plots,” McCallum told the BBC. “So the terrorist threat to the UK, I am sorry to say, is a real and enduring thing.” “Of course there are likely to be terrorist attacks on UK soil on my watch. We wish it were not so and we spend our lives working as hard as we possibly can with partners to stop these things happening and constantly challenging ourselves on how we can...do the best we possibly can. “To our horror, we know that that won’t be possible on every single occasion.” McCallum said that after Al Qaeda’s plane hijackings of September 11, 2001, the threat had evolved with the so-called Islamic State group inspiring followers into extremism online. He added UK intelligence would plan for the chance that “more risk, progressively, may flow our way”. The current national terror threat to the UK is assessed to be “substantial” — the third-highest of five levels, meaning an attack is “likely”. The MI5 director-general also reflected on how, 20 years ago, he watched on an office television with colleagues as the second plane hit the World Trade Center in New York. “Someone else said ‘I guess we all know what we’re going to be doing for the next 10 years of our lives’, and so it proved.” Asked if he knew who Osama Bin Laden was at the time of the attacks, McCallum responded: “Yes, absolutely.” “We had been watching the rise of these extremist threats for some time,” he added. “Obviously Al Qaeda had struck the US embassies in East Africa in 1998. “We’d seen attacks in Yemen in the year 2000. And something that is often forgotten is that in the UK, ten months before 9/11, we disrupted with the police a bomb plot in Birmingham. (It was) not formerly by Al Qaeda the organisation but this wave of terrorism was already coming towards us.” Describing how the terrorist threat had changed over the past decade, McCallum reflected that although the number of plots MI5 disrupts now is higher than it was directly after 9/11, they are “smaller plots of lower sophistication.” He explained that the so-called Islamic State had achieved something Al Qaeda hadn’t by managing to inspire lots of people with no direct connection to the organisation to take their online instructional material and attempt much smaller scale plots.