Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

British security chief says 4,000 involved in terror

Kevin Sullivan Washington Post

LONDON – British security officials suspect that at least 4,000 people are involved in terrorism-related activities in Britain and that al-Qaida’s “deliberate campaign” against Britain poses the “most immediate and acute peacetime threat” to the nation in a century, the head of Britain’s domestic spy agency said Monday.

“Terrorist attacks we have seen against the U.K. are not simply random plots by disparate and fragmented groups,” said Jonathan Evans, director general of Britain’s Security Service, commonly known as MI5. “The majority of these attacks, successful or otherwise, have taken place because al-Qaida has a clear determination to mount terrorist attacks against the United Kingdom.”

Addressing the Society of Editors in Manchester, England, Evans said security agents are watching about 2,000 suspected terrorists in Britain and they suspect “there are as many again that we don’t yet know of.”

The rise in the number of identified terrorism suspects in Britain is partly attributable to increased efforts by security services to track plotters, Evans said. British agencies have refocused on potential domestic terrorists since suicide bomb attacks on the London public transit system in July 2005 killed 52 passengers.

In the past 18 months, British officials have broken up alleged plots to bomb transatlantic jetliners and detonate car bombs outside a crowded central London nightclub.

Echoing Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who recently described the fight against radical Islamic terrorism as a “generation-long challenge,” Evans said that al-Qaida’s campaign against Britain is expanding and that “there remains a steady flow of new recruits to the extremist cause.”

He said youths as young as 15 have been involved in terrorist plots in Britain.

Evans also noted that the plots against Britain are “being driven from an increasing range of overseas countries.”

He said that in the past five years, much of the “command, control and inspiration” for attack planning in Britain has come from al-Qaida’s core leadership in tribal areas of Pakistan, while British citizens have mounted the actual attacks.

In several recent cases, police said some of the suspects had visited Pakistan and trained in terrorist camps there.