The Home Office has circulated a warning about the threat of Iranian terrorist activity in the UK.
The rare move follows comments made by Ken McCallum, the director of MI5, earlier this month who said Iran has plotted the assassination and kidnapping of at least 10 British residents it accuses of being “enemies of the regime”.
The Home Office statement given to Community Security Trust (a Jewish security group in the UK) and other groups, said, “You may have seen reports in the media that the Director of MI5 gave his annual threat update this week.
“In it, he spoke about how the instability in Iran is bringing real-world consequences here in the UK. Iran has become the state-actor which most frequently crosses into terrorism, and we have seen that the regime is resorting to more and more extreme measures to silence its critics at home – we also see that Iran projects that threat directly to the UK, through its aggressive intelligence services.
“We know that, at the most extreme end, Iran’s ambitions include kidnapping and even killing British or UK-based individuals who they perceive to be enemies of the regime. The UK’s intelligence services have identified at least ten such threats since January alone.”
The Home Office added:”The UK government does not tolerate intimidation or threats to life towards any individuals living in the UK, and through its intelligence agencies and police forces will continue to use all tools at their disposal to combat this threat.”
In his annual speech on the threats facing the UK, Ken McCallum, MI5’s director general, said Iran’s “aggressive intelligence services” had crossed over into launching terrorist attacks on British soil.
Jewish News reports that there are fears that as a result of increased instability of the regime in Tehran, which has been rocked by widespread demonstrations from women protesters demanding equal rights, terror groups such as Hezbollah could carry out attacks in the West.
CST told Jewish News that there is no specific anti-Jewish threat at this time.
Hezbollah had previously bombed a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1994, and carried out a further attack on Israeli tourists in Bulgaria in 2012.
Hezbollah was fully banned in the UK in 2019, but CUFI continues to urge the UK government to ban the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is proscribed by countries around the world, but not yet by the UK.
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