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Threat of Terrorism in UK Reaches ‘Scale We’ve Not Seen Before’

Threat of Terrorism in UK Reaches ‘Scale We’ve Not Seen Before’
Threat of Terrorism in UK Reaches ‘Scale We’ve Not Seen Before’

The chief of MI5, the United Kingdom’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency, has warned that terror attacks will show no sign of abating in the UK in the immediate future.

“The threat is multi-dimensional, evolving rapidly and operating at a scale and pace we’ve not seen before. It’s at the highest tempo I have seen in my 34-year career,” Andrew Parker told reporters on Tuesday, Sputnik reported.

He referred to a “dramatic shift in the threat” from extremist terrorism in 2017, activity which he said “can be harder to detect.”

He drew attention to the fact that that terrorist attacks “can sometimes accelerate from inception through planning to action in just a handful of days,” something that “can give us a smaller window to intervene.”

Admitting that “the threat is more diverse” than he has ever known, Parker pointed to “plots developed” both in the UK and beyond.

The current terrorism threat level in Britain is set at “severe,” which means that an attack is highly likely.

Charting the scale of the problem, Parker said that MI5 and police have stopped seven attacks by extremists in the past seven months. Twenty major acts have been detected in the past four years and 379 suspects have been arrested in the first six months of this year, The Independent reported.

There are, at present, 500 live operations under way targeting 3,000 people with 20,000 more who have been on the counter-terrorism radar and others who are not even known to the law agencies, he said.

Parker recalled that he had said in a speech two years ago that despite a string of successful operations he feared “that we had not yet reached the high-water mark”.

The internet has provided terrorists with access and immediacy. “They can go online to get explosives and learn how to build a bomb”, said the director general.

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