High-tech threat as jihadis return home

THE terror threat will rise as Western jihadis in Iraq and Syria return home with battlehardened skills in high-tech methods of attack, a report has warned.

Security services fear there will be more attacks using new technologies, such as drones, as Islamic State fighters are pushed out of their strongholds and make their way back to Britain and Europe, it was claimed.

The chilling report by Jane’s Terrorof ism and Insurgency Centre (JTIC) found that new and ‘more destructive methods’ of attack will emerge in the next two years. It came as Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson warned during a summit in Rome yesterday that the threat posed by militants was ‘evolving and intensifying’.

There are believed to be some 270 UK fighters currently in Syria and Iraq.

The JTIC report examined the threat from terrorism over the next five to ten years, but also warned that growing numbers of Islamist convicts are likely to exacerbate the risk radicalisation in prisons. The report added: ‘Security services will struggle to adequately monitor a combination of returning militants, an increased number of radical Islamist networks involved in the propagation of terrorism, and the radicalisation risks associated with a substantially increasing Islamist prison population.’

Data analysed by JTIC also found many of those imprisoned for providing support to groups such as Islamic State in the past two years could be released between 2019 and 2023. It suggested that Islamist groups that previously held support roles – such as spreading propaganda or financing – could be moved to operational ones.

These could include ‘setting up cells, acquiring weapons, providing facilities and safe houses for explosives building, and recruiting militants for attacks in Europe’.

Meanwhile, the fate of two Londoners suspected of being members of an Islamic State execution group dubbed ‘The Beatles’ risks becoming a diplomatic row.

US defence secretary Jim Mattis signalled he would use the Rome meeting to press allies to take back captured militants to face justice in their home countries, but ministers have resisted suggestions that Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh – who have been stripped of British citizenship – should return to the UK.

The trial of an Uzbek man who confessed to ramming a truck into a crowd in Stockholm, killing five people, started yesterday. Rakhmat Akilov said he wanted to punish Sweden for participating in the international coalition against IS.