UK accuses Russia of planning to create mayhem across Europe

Director General of MI5 Ken McCallum said Tuesday that Russia’s intelligence agency has been on a mission to generate “sustained mayhem on British and European streets.” Giving his annual update on security threats faced by the UK, Ken McCallum said that GRU (Russia’s GRU military intelligence service) agents had carried out “arson, sabotage and more dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness” in Britain after the UK backed Ukraine in its war with Russia.

MI5 had also responded to 20 plots backed by Iran since 2022, although he added the majority of its work still mostly involved Islamist extremism followed by extreme right-wing terrorism, he said at MI5’s counter-terrorism operations centre in London.

There were a “dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies” MI5 had to deal with, he noted.

Young people are increasingly being drawn into online extremism, with 13 percent of those investigated for terrorism involvement aged under 18.

A total of 43 late-stage plots involving firearms and explosi
ves to commit “mass murder” in the UK have been foiled since 2017.

The number of state-threat investigations by MI5 had increased by 48 percent Counter-terrorism work remained split between “75% Islamist extremism, 25% extreme right-wing terrorism” On China, he said the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had a programme to steal data and information from the UK and “we have seen 20,000 obfuscated approaches to individuals by China.”

Source: Kuwait News Agency