Chemical attack possibility in UK ‘getting closer’ – min

Scandals show Russian clout

LONDON, Oct 9, (Agencies): The possibility of a terrorist attack involving chemical or biological weapons is getting closer, Britain’s security minister and top counter-terrorism police officer warned on Tuesday.

“I see plots where the only limit to the ambition of our adversaries is their imagination,” Ben Wallace told a security conference in London.

“As I speak, terrorists continue to explore new ways to kill us on our streets: chemical and biological weapons are marching in closer. They have developed and worked on a better arsenal. We have to be prepared for the day that might come to our streets here.”

Last year, Britain suffered five attacks that the authorities blamed on terrorism that killed 36 people, four of which were carried out by Islamist militants.

In addition, police say another 17 plots were foiled and the national threat level remains at “severe”, meaning an attack is considered highly likely.

“These things have been used on the battlefield and what’s used on the battlefield will eventually be adapted to be used on domestic soil,” Neil Basu, the UK police lead for counter-terrorism, said when asked about Wallace’s comments on chemical and biological weapons.

“So I think he is as concerned as I am that these are the kind of threats we’ve got to take very seriously and we have got to make sure we have the right preparations to counter that threat.”

British security services, like those across Europe, have been worried about those who left the UK to fight on behalf of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, returning home and bringing back the knowledge they learned on the battlefields there.

Wallace said about 900 Britons had gone to fight in Syria and Iraq and just under half had returned while more than 150 had been killed.

Meanwhile, Russia’s military spies are being mocked abroad as bunglers but the army’s influence over Kremlin foreign policy is growing and there is little likelihood it will halt its “black operations”.

The GRU military intelligence agency is blamed by the West for several botched attacks this year, including attempting to kill former spy Sergei Skripal with a nerve agent in the English city of Salisbury and trying to hack the global chemical weapons watchdog in the Netherlands.

Russia’s denials of wrongdoing have at times caused incredulous laughter in the West and some of the world’s media have cast the GRU, which helped annex the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine in 2014, as blundering amateurs.

But Western intelligence experts and Russian sources familiar with policy-making in the Kremlin say the West must stay on its guard.

“It’s easy to laugh at some of the GRU’s poor tradecraft and their ability but we should not underestimate them nor indeed the dangerous and reckless use of nerve agent on our streets,” British Security Minister Ben Wallace told a security conference in Britain on Tuesday.

Wallace

‘Poisoning suspect decorated by Putin’:

Investigative group Bellingcat on Tuesday said the second suspect in the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was personally decorated as a hero by President Vladimir Putin in 2014.

The site on Monday said the man, who used the alias “Alexander Petrov”, was in fact Alexander Mishkin, a trained military doctor employed by Moscow’s GRU military intelligence service.

Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins and researcher Christo Grozev told reporters at an event in the British parliament on Tuesday that they found out Mishkin had taken part in undercover operations in Ukraine and the breakaway republic of Transnistria.

Higgins and Grozev also said that Mishkin took part in military operations in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and was made a Hero of the Russian Federation by Putin in autumn of the same year.

Bellingcat has previously identified GRU colonel Anatoly Chepiga as the other suspect and said that he too had received Russia’s highest award in the same year in a secret ceremony in the Kremlin.

The two men are accused by British authorities of attempting to murder Skripal and his daughter Yulia with a Soviet-made nerve agent called Novichok in March in the city of Salisbury in southwest England.

40 willing to vote down Brexit deal:

At least 40 lawmakers in Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party are willing to vote down her possible Brexit deal if it leaves the United Kingdom ‘half in and half out’ of the European Union, a senior lawmaker said on Tuesday.

“My estimate is that there are at least 40 colleagues who are not going to accept a ‘half in, half out’ Chequers deal or indeed a backstop that leaves us in the internal market and the customs union,” lawmaker Steve Baker told BBC radio.

“Colleagues will not tolerate a half in, half out Brexit,” said Baker, who served as a junior Brexit minister in May’s government until he resigned in protest at her Brexit proposals.

If May secures a deal with the EU, she has to get the British parliament to approve it and would need the backing of about 320 lawmakers to get approval.

If 40 of her lawmakers voted against a possible deal, the fate of the government and exit process would depend on the opposition Labour Party, which has indicated it will vote against almost any deal May might secure.

Under May’s proposals, Britain will seek a free trade area for goods with the EU, largely by accepting a “common rulebook” for goods and British participation in EU agencies that provide authorisations for goods.

Some Brexiteers say those proposals would ensure the EU kept control over swathes of the British economy and thus run counter to the spirit of her manifesto pledge to leave the EU Customs Union and the Single Market.

“We are awaiting the detail of exactly what we are going to be asked for vote for. I don’t doubt that every possible technique us going to be used to sow doubt in colleagues’ minds and to encourage them to vote with the government,” Baker said.

“In the end the EU is not entitled to split the UK and it’s not entitled to constrain how we regulate our economy and govern ourselves after we leave,” he added.

Without an approved deal, the UK would move from seamless trade with the rest of the European Union to customs arrangements set by the World Trade Organization for external states with no preferential deals.