MI5's intelligence chief says Russia and Iran are behind a “staggering” increase in deadly attacks

LONDON (AP) — Britain is facing a “staggering rise” in assassinations, sabotage and other crimes on British soil by Russia and Iran as the two states recruit criminals to “do their dirty work.” Head of British domestic intelligence said Tuesday.

MI5 director-general Ken McCallum said his agents and police had tackled 20 Iran-backed “potentially fatal” attacks since 2022 and warned that Iran could expand its targets in the UK as conflicts in the Middle East deepen tighten.

So far, the threats have been directed against Iranians abroad who oppose the country's authorities. But McCallum said there was a risk of “an increase or expansion of Iranian state aggression in the United Kingdom” if the Middle East crisis escalates and Israel launches a major attack in response to Iran's recent rocket fire.

In a rare public speech outlining the main threats to the UK from both states and militant groups, McCallum argued that hostile states, radicalized individuals and a resurgent Islamic State group together “created the most complex and interconnected threat environment that we ever had.” seen.”

McCallum said there was also a risk of Israel's conflicts with Iranian-backed groups – the militant Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well Houthi rebels in Yemen – could trigger attacks in the UK, although the crisis in the UK has not yet spilled over into “terrorist violence on a large scale”.

The number of state threat investigations carried out by MI5 has increased by 48% in the past year, with Iran, Russia and China the main perpetrators, McCallum told reporters at the UK's counter-terrorism command center in London.

McCallum has been saying this ever since Death of Mahsa Aminiwho died in Iranian police custody in September 2022 after being arrested for allegedly violating the Islamic Republic's mandatory headscarf law, “we have seen one conspiracy after another here in the UK, at an unprecedented pace and scale.”

He said MI5 and police had responded to 20 potentially deadly Iran-backed attacks since January 2022, an increase of a third on the figure of 15 the government said at the end of January.

McCallum said Russian military intelligence was trying to use “arson, sabotage and more” to cause “chaos” on the streets of Britain and other European countries.

Both Russia and Iran often turn to criminals, “from international drug traffickers to low-level criminals,” to carry out their illegal acts, he said.

Several alleged state-sponsored conspiracies led to criminal charges. In December, a Chechen man was jailed for allegedly carrying out reconnaissance work at the offices of a dissident Iranian broadcaster in London. Additionally, several suspects are awaiting trial in London over a suspected Russian-linked plot to attack Ukrainian companies.

Britain is not alone in pointing the finger at Moscow and Tehran. Germany has arrested several people alleged espionage or planning of attacks on behalf of Russia. In May, Sweden's domestic secret service accused Iran of using criminal networks to target Israeli or Jewish interests in the Scandinavian country.

Previous speeches by McCallum and other British intelligence chiefs have highlighted China's increasingly assertive behavior, which McCallum described as Britain's biggest “strategic challenge” in 2022. On Tuesday, McCallum stressed the importance of the economic relationship between Britain and China, but said there were “risks that need to be managed.”

The UK's official terror threat level is “significant”, at the middle of a five-point scale, meaning an attack is likely, and McCallum said MI5 and police had foiled 43 late-stage attacks since 2017 and “numerous Lives would have been saved.”

While about three-quarters of the conspiracies stem from Islamic extremist ideologies and a quarter from far-right ideologies, he said those labels “do not fully reflect the dizzying array of beliefs and ideologies that we see” and come from a soup of “online hate “originating, conspiracy theories and disinformation.” Young people are increasingly involved, he said, with 13% of people involved in MI5 terror investigations being under 18.

He also said there were worrying signs that the Islamic State group was trying to make a comeback, despite the collapse of its self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria several years ago.

McCallum said that “after a few years of restraint, they have resumed their efforts to export terrorism,” citing an attack in March killed more than 140 people in a Moscow concert hall and was described by ISIS as “a brutal demonstration of its capabilities.”

MI5 has has been criticized for its failure to stop deadly attacksincluding a suicide attack in 2017 that killed 22 people at once Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.

“The first 20 years of my career here were fraught with terrorist threats,” McCallum said. “We are now faced with this, alongside state-sponsored assassinations and sabotage attacks, against the backdrop of a major European land war.”

MI5, he said, “has a bloody hard job ahead of it.”

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Associated Press writer Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen contributed to this story.