MI5 alleges Iran plotted 10 kidnappings and murders

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16th Nov, 2022. 11:03 pm
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Director of MI5 reveals Iran has threatened to kidnap or kill UK citizens this year.
Ken McCallum made the revelations in his annual report on threats to the UK.
He also warned the UK must be ready for Russia’s “aggression for years to come”.

Iran has allegedly threatened to kidnap or kill at least ten Britons or UK residents this year. Ken McCallum, the director of MI5, disclosed the number in his yearly report on threats to the UK.

Mr. McCallum also warned the UK “must be ready for Russian aggression for years to come”.

But he said that due to the widespread expulsion of Russia’s agents after its invasion of Ukraine, the country had suffered a strategic setback.

“No one should be under any illusion about the breadth and variety of the threats we face in 2022,” Mr McCallum told an audience inside Thames House, the security service’s London headquarters.

He warned the biggest shifts his service was seeing came in threats posed by other states who were “not squeamish about the tactics they deploy”.

Iran projected threats “directly” in the UK through its “aggressive intelligence services”, he said.

This included ambitions to kidnap or even kill British or UK-based people perceived as enemies of the regime, he said.

“We have seen at least 10 such potential threats since January alone,” he revealed.

It was revealed last week that Iranian journalists working out of the UK had been warned by the police about possible dangers to their lives.

Mr. McCallum said MI5 had been working with domestic and international partners to disrupt what he called “completely unacceptable activity”.

He said he was unable to go into further detail about the alleged schemes, but added that Iran had occasionally used its own spies and other people to work as their agents, employing a variety of strategies, sometimes acting within Western nations and other times luring people back to Iran.

He claimed that in recent years, Europe had witnessed the nation’s willingness to engage in “reckless” conduct.

The Director of MI5 claimed that Iran was also aiding Russia, particularly by delivering drones that, in his words, were “inflicting suffering” in Ukraine.

He warned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had been “raising national security questions some thought consigned to the history books”.

Moscow will continue to use a mixture of covert threats – like spies and cyber-attacks – as well as more open means like pressure on energy prices and disinformation to target the UK, he warned. “They will keep attacking us.”

However, the head of MI5 was upbeat about nations’ abilities to make it more difficult for Russian spies to conduct their operations.

More than 600 Russian officials have been expelled around the world since the invasion of Ukraine in February and more than 400 are believed to be spies, Mr. McCallum revealed. “This has struck the most significant strategic blow against the Russian intelligence services in recent European history.”

In the UK, 23 Russian spies posing as diplomats had been expelled. But in addition some 100 more Russians have been denied diplomatic visas on national security grounds to replace them, he said.

“We should not be complacent,” the MI5 head added. “We need to be prepared to expect Russian aggression covertly and overtly against the UK in the years to come.”

He warned China was a “large and enduing challenge” using “all means at their disposal” to monitor and sometimes intimidate those considered opponents.

Recently a pro-democracy protester was attacked at the Chinese consulate in Manchester.

“We’re seeing further indications of that repression,” the MI5 chief said, adding this was extending beyond the reports of overseas police stations into other ways of applying pressure on those challenging Beijing.

“To intimidate and harass UK nationals or those who have made the UK their home cannot be tolerated,” Mr McCallum said.

Chinese intelligence services continued to try to influence public life, according to Mr. McCallum, including by recruiting potential agents early in their careers, such as as local councilors or before they had become parliamentary candidates. In January, MI5 issued an unusual interference alert about Chinese attempts to influence UK politics.

He claimed that even if it was not as severe as it was a few years ago, terrorism still posed a concern.

He reported an increase of eight since his update on threats last year, when MI5 and the police stated they had thwarted 37 late-stage attack plots since 2017.

These terrorist acts mixed extreme right-wing and Islamic extremism.

Regarding the latter, he claimed that MI5 was noticing an increase in the number of right-wing extremist influencers operating internationally and spreading conspiracies.

In addition to what he called “the nasty challenge of self-initiated lone actor terrorists, fiendishly hard to detect and disrupt,” he claimed that MI5 was still observing worldwide terror networks seeking to reassemble.

The increase in attempts to obtain firearms, particularly homemade and 3-D printed weaponry, is concerning.

MI5 alleges Iran plotted 10 kidnappings and murders

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