Police and intelligence services have foiled 31 plots to attack Britain in the last four years, Ken McCallum, director-general of the M15 domestic intelligence agency on Friday.
He added that most of the attacks were from Islamist extremists, but a growing number are organised by far-right groups. “Even during the pandemic, we have all been enduring for most of the last two years, we have to disrupt six late-stage attack plots,” McCallum told BBC.
With the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Ken McCallum reflected on where he was present when the planes hit the twin towers. He said, “I was working as what we call an agent runner, working with human sources inside terrorist organisations in Northern Ireland. On the morning of 9/11, or the lunchtime as it was in the UK when the first plane struck the twin towers we turned on the television in the corner of a room. As the second plane struck, a colleague quietly said: Osama Bin Laden.”
Explaining how terrorist threat had changed over the years, McCallum reflected that although the number of plots M15 disrupts now is higher than it was directly after 9/11, they are smaller plots of lower sophistication.
