UK facing 'plot after plot' from rogue states and terror groups, warns MI5 chief

Sir Keir Starmer has warned of the “sober findings” in a speech by the head of MI5 who outlined how British intelligence is facing a “hell of a job” over rising threats from Iran and Russia, as well as the resurgence of Isis and al-Qaeda.

- TOM WATLING, DAVID MADDOX

A day after the prime minister called on the international community to focus on the “malign” regime in Iran, which supports proxies across the Middle East including Hamas and Hezbollah, Ken McCallum said British intelligence has thwarted 20 Tehran-backed plots that “presented potentially lethal threats to British citizens” since the start of 2022.

Sir Keir had used the first anniversary of Hamas’s brutal 7 October terrorist attack on Israel to warn MPs and the international community that the focus now needs to be on dealing with Iran and not blocking weapons to Israel.

But going into graphic detail, Mr McCallum linked the ongoing war in the Middle East to the major threats the UK is still facing domestically from Islamist terrorist groups. “We’ve seen plot after plot here in the UK, at an unprecedented pace and scale,” the MI5 director general said.

With fears growing of all-out war across the Middle East, with Israel expanding a ground invasion in Lebanon against Hezbollah and a year-long war in Gaza against Hamas, the director general of MI5 said British intelligence was “powerfully alive to the risk that events in the Middle East directly trigger terrorist action in the UK”.

“As events unfold in the Middle East, we will give our fullest attention to the risk of an increase in – or broadening of – Iranian state aggression in the UK,” he added. He gave an example from December when a man was jailed for reconnaissance he had carried out against the then headquarters of the Iran International media organisation, a body that is outside the control of Tehran’s autocratic regime.