According to MI5 chief Ken McCallum, since 2022, MI5 agents and British police have stopped 20 planned murders involving Iranian-backed actors.

He warned that Iran may escalate its actions in the UK if Israel attacks Iran after the missile attack last week.

“We have seen plan after plan here in the UK, at a pace and scale that has never been seen before,” says McCallum.

The head of MI5 briefed the British people on the threats posed by enemy states and terrorist groups on Tuesday. He said there was also a risk that Israel's conflicts with Iranian-backed militias such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen could lead to terrorist attacks in the UK.

Nearly 50 percent of cases are more

MI5 dealt with 48 per cent of hostile foreign activity cases in the UK last year, according to McCallum.

He points to Iran, Russia and China as the most central players.

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Russian intelligence is trying to use “arson, sabotage and other means” to create chaos in the streets of both Britain and other countries in Europe, according to McCallum.

He says that Russia and Iran often recruit criminals to carry out attacks on their behalf.

Maybe with terrorist attacks

The terrorist threat in the UK is assessed as “substantial”. It is level three out of five on the scale and means that a terrorist attack is considered likely.

Since 2017, British authorities have foiled 43 terrorist plots that were in the final planning stages, according to McCallum.

He says that radical Islamists are behind three-quarters of them, while far-right groups are behind a quarter. He also points out that these labels do not fully reflect the range of “beliefs and ideologies that we see.” This is driven by “online hate, conspiracy theories and misinformation,” McCallum adds.