Russia on mission to cause mayhem on UK streets, head of MI5 warns

Russia's quality bureau has been connected a ngo to make "sustained mayhem connected British and European streets", the caput of MI5 has said, arsenic helium warned the UK faces the astir "complex and interconnected" menace it has ever seen.

There person besides been 20 Iran-backed plots since 2022, the manager wide Ken McCallum said.

He said the analyzable premix of terror-related threats and threats from federation states meant that MI5 had "one hellhole of a occupation connected its hands".

A full of 43 late-stage plots to perpetrate "mass murder" successful the UK person been foiled since 2017, helium said, involving firearms and explosives.

Mr McCallum said the information service's counter-terrorism enactment inactive mostly progressive Islamic extremism, followed by "extreme right-wing terrorism".

But helium added determination was a "dizzying scope of beliefs and ideologies" MI5 had to woody with.

"The archetypal 20 years of my vocation present were crammed afloat of violent threats. We present look those alongside state-backed assassination and sabotage plots, against the backdrop of a large European onshore war," helium said.

In a briefing astatine MI5’s counter-terrorism operations centre successful London, Mr McCallum said successful the past year, the fig of state-threat investigations by MI5 accrued by 48%.

He besides expressed interest implicit the fig of young radical being drawn into online extremism.

About 13% of those investigated for engagement successful coercion were nether 18 - a threefold summation successful the past 3 years, helium added.

Separately, Mr McCallum outlined the wide-ranging threats the state faces, which person been exacerbated by the internet.

He said a precocious proportionality of the menace was made up by “lone individuals indoctrinated online".

“In acheronian corners of the internet, speech is cheap. Sorting the existent plotters from armchair extremists is an exacting task,” helium told reporters.

“Anonymous online connections are often inconsequential, but a number pb to deadly, existent enactment actions.”

He spoke of the trouble the information work faces portion dealing with "volatile, would-be terrorists with lone a tenuous grip of ideologies".