British thwart plot to kill prime minister
2 suspects facing terrorism charges
LONDON — A terrorist plot against British prime minister Theresa May has been thwarted, prosecutors said when two suspects in their 20s appeared in court Wednesday.
Word of the planned attack coincided with what the authorities have depicted as mounting concern about the intensity, scale and pace of conspiracies by violent extremists.
There have been five terrorist attacks in Britain this year, killing dozens of people. An official report on Tuesday said the worst of those assaults — at a concert by the pop star Ariana Grande in Manchester in May — might have been averted “had the cards fallen differently.”
The planned attack on Ms. May was to begin with a bombing of the security gates that protect 10 Downing Street — the home and office of British prime ministers — as a prelude to an attempt to stab her to death, prosecutors said.
Two suspects — Naa’imur Zakariyah Rahman, 20, and Mohammed Aqib Imran, 21 — were arrested Nov. 28. Mr. Rahman, a resident of north London, is accused of planning the bombing and knife attack. Mr. Imran, from Birmingham in the English Midlands, is accused of preparing acts of terrorism by traveling to Libya to join the Islamic State militant group.
Mark Carroll, a prosecutor, told the Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday that Mr. Rahman had planned to set off explosives at the gates of 10 Downing Street. In the ensuing chaos, he hoped to gain access to Ms. May’s office and stage a “secondary attack” using “a suicide vest, pepper spray and a knife” to “attack, kill and cause explosions.” The accused did not indicate how they would plead when the case went before a higher court at the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court, on Dec. 20. In Parliament on Tuesday, the home secretary, Amber Rudd, said 22 Islamist plots had been prevented in the past four years, nine of them since March, when an assailant in a sport utility vehicle mowed down pedestrians and stabbed a police officer outside Parliament. Five people died in that attack, including the assailant, a 52-year-old Briton, Khalid Masood. In May, Salman Abedi, a 22-year-old Briton of Libyan descent, blew himself up outside the concert hall in Manchester, killing himself and 22 others. On Tuesday, an official report into attacks in May and June said counterterrorism officers had misinterpreted two items of intelligence handed to them before the killings in Manchester. Mr. Abedi was not being actively investigated at the time of the attack, but the items of intelligence could have led to an inquiry had their “true significance been properly understood.”