Jihadi threat ‘as bad as the IRA in 1970s’
THE terror threat in Britain is at a level not seen since the height of the Troubles, the UK’s new watchdog warned yesterday.
Max Hill QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, warned that Islamic State is planning ‘indiscriminate attacks on innocent civilians’ on a scale similar to those perpetrated by the IRA in the 1970s.
Jihadis are targeting UK cities, creating an ‘enormous ongoing risk which none of us can ignore’, he said. His comments were endorsed by Home Secretary Amber Rudd, who said the terror threat was at its highest ‘in living memory’.
In his 30 years as a prosecutor Mr Hill helped convict the 21/7 London bomb plotters, secure the last successful IRA prosecution in Britain, and imprison the killers of Damilola Taylor, the ten-year-old boy stabbed to death in the capital in 2000.
In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, the QC said the threat facing Britain was at least as bad as 40 years ago. ‘It is possible to point to distinctions in terms of the mindset, organisation and strategy of dif- ferent terrorist groups and therefore it would be wrong to draw a simple comparison between Irish republicanism and the ideology of so-called Islamic State,’ he said.
‘But in terms of the threat that’s represented, I think the intensity and the potential frequency of serious plot planning – with a view to indiscriminate attacks on innocent civilians of whatever race or colour in metropolitan areas – represents an enormous ongoing risk that none of us can ignore.
‘I think that there is undoubtedly significant ongoing risk which is at least as great as the threat to London in the 1970s when the IRA were active on the mainland.’
Mr Hill also expressed ‘enormous concern’ at the likely return of hundreds of British jihadis who have fought for IS in the Middle East – particularly as Iraqi forces get closer to taking the terror group’s former stronghold of Mosul.
In addition, he defended the Government’s decision to approve compensation of up to £1million for Ronald Fiddler, an ex-Guantanamo detainee who this month carried out a suicide attack in Iraq. Mr Hill said the risk from Fiddler ‘was simply not present, not visible, not detectable at the time of the payout’.
‘Risk that none of us can ignore’