SWOOP IN EAST LONDON
MI5 smashes ‘tide of plots’ but threat is still growing
Police ran together military style into the estate guns pointing in the air
SHAFIQ MARA WITNESS TO SWOOP ON FLATS YESTERDAY CUFFED Woman in restraints is escorted into police van SEIZED Man wearing a hoodie is taken away by detectives COUNTER terror police and MI5 officers have waged an increasingly frenetic war against Islamist terrorism since even before the 9/11 atrocity.
More than a dozen major plots, some with possible death tolls topping the near 3,000 killed in 9/11, were smashed by them.
After the March Westminster attack, MI5 has intercepted many plots and stopped at least five since Khalid Masood’s killings.
The pace at which MI5 officers in London, in their regional offices and abroad are working is at an almost unprecedented level.
There are around 23,000 people in Britain who are known potential radicals – among them 3,000 on watch lists.
That number has been on the rise exponentially every year since we first became aware of the figures after the 7/7 2005 attack in London.
BRUTAL
The brutal truth is that MI5 has been holding back the tide of attacks for years, intercepting plots of varying magnitude with a professionalism world intelligence agencies can only dream of.
A perfect storm of everything needed to spawn an escalating global terror disease has occurred – some of it not helped by the West, some of it ignored and some of it very much our fault.
Wars in Iraq, Syria, and now Libya, have spawned a dreadful, twisted and hate-fuelled lust for ideological violence and now disparate groups are copying each other.
The hatred of the West was already there – that is true, but not on this scale.
People who have become killers abroad have developed the skills needed to carry them out when they get home, spurred on by hatred instilled in them by recruiters.
These psychos don’t need to sign up to Islamic State or al-Qaeda – all they have to do is say they are IS or al-Qaeda and those groups will take credit for their atrocities. The West has been at war for some years against extremism, but the frontlines are now here – and our security forces have reached critical mass in trying to cope.
KILLER Khalid Masood