Terror police reveal they stopped 19 ‘late-stage’ UK assault plots prior to now 5 years – and are monitoring greater than 1,000 harmful extremists
Scotland Yard’s counter-terror chief has revealed they have stopped 19 ‘late-stage’ UK attack plots in the last five years.
Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor described the interventions as ‘goal-line saves’ and said 1,000 dangerous extremists are currently being monitored.
He warned terror group ISIS has regrouped in the last six years since its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a US-led military operation in 2019.
Talking to The Crime Agents podcast, Mr Taylor said counter-terror police are currently juggling 800 cases with 75 per cent linked to Islamist terrorism.
‘The threat that we saw 20 years ago has never gone away. It kind of ebbs and flows. In terms of capabilities overseas, the influence to get things done abroad, we’ve definitely seen an uptick in some of that,’ he said.
‘There’s no question that their (ISIS) ambition has always been to attack the West. We know that their ambitions have grown and we are seeing people who are still intent on doing that sort of activity. It just has never gone away.
‘I think at the moment we are probably in one of those more upward trajectories but the more activity we do, potentially we can disrupt that.’
The Manchester Synagogue attack in October was carried out by ISIS-supporter Jihad Al Shamie.
The 35-year-old deliberately crashed his car outside Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue and began knifing worshippers.
Scotland Yard’s counter-terror chief Laurence Taylor has revealed they have stopped 19 ‘late-stage’ UK attack plots in the last five years
The Assistant Commissioner warned terror group ISIS has regrouped in the last six years. The Manchester Synagogue attack in October was carried out by ISIS-supporter Jihad Al Shamie (pictured)
Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby were tragically killed in the attack, which happened on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.
Mr Taylor said no other plots had been foiled since that attack, but said the threats Britain faces are ‘broad, complex, and some of those traditional threats still exist and are challenging for us’.
He said the Government’s deradicalisation programme, Prevent, is expected to have 10,000 referrals this year, but Mr Taylor doesn’t believe it ‘has got the capacity to deal with the volume of things that are going through it now’.
‘Prevent was set up to deal predominantly with Islamist ideologies and also now looks at extreme right wing. If you don’t have an ideology or you’ve got mixed ideologies, Prevent is not the right place for you. And that’s one of the challenges,’ he said.
Online radicalisation is a growing challenge for counter-terror police, and Mr Taylor took aim at X and Meta bosses Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg for ‘not doing nearly enough’ in stopping algorithms ‘pumping’ extremist content.
He admitted he has no idea what his own two sons are looking at on Tiktok and Snapchat ‘so how do we keep our young people safe online?’.
‘It comes down to what their moral perspective is, how they’re running their business,’ he said.
‘I would put huge pressure on tech bosses to manage this more effectively. And we need to. But we also need laws to do this.’
Last May, Police and MI5 foiled a suspected plot by Iranian terrorists to carry out a major attack in Britain.
Counter-terror officers and Special Forces raided two suspected Iranian cells in a ‘highly significant’ operation to tackle growing activity by the hostile state in the UK.
Sources said the alleged plot to target a UK premises was a ‘major attack’ that could have led to an imminent threat to life.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said that the arrests ‘reflect some of the biggest counter-state threat and counter-terrorism operations we have seen in recent years’.
