Suspect arrested over Iran-backed plot to attack Israeli embassy ‘arrived in UK as asylum seeker'
Thomas Godfrey
Michael Hamilton
Published: Invalid Date,
AT least one Iranian suspect arrested over an alleged plot to attack the Israeli embassy in London had made a claim for asylum in the UK, it is understood.
The man was among five held by armed counter-terror police over an imminent bid to target a 'specific premises' — said to be the high-security consulate in Kensington, West London.
4
4
4
It is now understood he had entered the UK from abroad and made an asylum claim, which was still ongoing when he was picked up in a series of national raids on May 3.
The five males were arrested in West London, Swindon, Manchester, Rochdale and Stockport, with Special Forces soldiers assisting police in the orchestrated operation.
Two of the suspects are aged 29, one is 24, another 40 and one is 46.
One of the five is said to have close ties to Iran's government.
Counter-terror police are still attempting to identify how the others arrived in the UK and what their backgrounds may be.
It leaves open the possibility that others from the group could have arrived in Britain either illegally or by other means to claim asylum.
Yesterday, the Met Police were granted warrants of further detention for four of the men.
It means they can be questioned until next Saturday, when they must be charged or bailed under the Terrorism Act, or released.
The fifth — a 24-year-old Iranian — has been released on conditional police bail to a date this month.
Official figures show asylum claims by Iranians have soared from 2,011 in 2014 to 8,099 in 2024 — a 302 per cent increase.
The Islamic republic ranks behind Pakistan and Afghanistan as the third highest nation for claims.
And more than 10,000 Iranians have come into the UK on small boats from Calais since June 2023, statistics also show.
The Met said its officers continue to carry out searches at a number of addresses in the Greater Manchester, London and Swindon areas.
Commander Dominic Murphy, head of the Met's Counter Terrorism Command, said: 'We are working incredibly hard with public safety at the forefront of our ongoing efforts.
'We have clear and critical reasons for not providing further details at this time. As soon as we can, we will look to share further information with the public.'
Israel's embassy in West London — the alleged target — is ringed by 8ft walls, guard posts, state-of-the-art monitoring systems and 24-hour armed security.
It means any attack would have had to use lethal force and likely take out specialist diplomatic protection cops in the process.
Security minister Dan Jarvis described the operation to arrest the alleged plotters as 'some of the largest counter-state threats and counter-terrorism actions we have seen in recent times'.
It has been reported taxpayer-funded asylum hotels were searched as part of the operation.
It comes as we can reveal how an Iranian-backed criminal group named by ministers last week had previously targeted Israel's consulate in Sweden.
The Foxtrot Network, already linked to shootings, bombings and targeted assaults across Europe, was referenced by Mr Jarvis a day after the May 3 arrests.
Swedish police have said the group attempted an attack on the embassy in Stockholm in January 2024 — with a hand grenade thrown near the building.
4
It was spotted by staff who called the police, and the device later destroyed in a controlled explosion.
Two teenagers were also accused of carrying out another attempted attack on the embassy last May at the direction of Iran-backed agents.
Iran's embassy in Sweden denied having a role in either attack.
It is unknown if Foxtrot had any involvement in the alleged plot to attack the London site.
The network's fugitive leader, Rawa Majid, 38, has been on the run since March after fleeing his home in Turkey.
He and Foxtrot had been sanctioned by the Foreign Office last month, and Mr Jarvis highlighted their actions again following the five UK-based arrests.
He said: 'The Government sanctioned the Foxtrot Network last month, a network involved in violence against Jewish and Israeli targets in Europe on behalf of the Iranian regime.'
The Foreign Office previously revealed more than 20 Iran-backed plots to kidnap or kill British nationals on UK soil have been thwarted since 2022.
Iran's Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi said: 'Iran in no uncertain terms categorically rejects any involvement in such actions.'
'WE MUST CONTROL MIGRATION'
By JULIA ATHERLEY
MIGRATION 'must be properly controlled and managed so the system is fair', the Home Secretary has said.
Yvette Cooper's comments come as ministers prepare to lay out sweeping reforms to the immigration system.
The skilled visa threshold will be increased to degree-level, and employers will be told they must train workers in the UK, under plans to be presented to Parliament tomorrow.
The Immigration White Paper is part of the Government's efforts to reduce net migration to the UK, with the figure reaching 728,000 in 2024.
Meanwhile, children and women were among those to arrive in Dover, Kent, yesterday — the first migrants to cross the Channel since May 2.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
12 minutes ago
- The Independent
HMRC failure to notify MPs sooner about £47m phishing scam ‘unacceptable'
HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has been warned by a committee of MPs that its failure to report details of a breach affecting around 100,000 taxpayers is 'unacceptable'. The Treasury Committee said it was only alerted to the information when a notification was published on the HMRC website on the same day as a live session. On June 4, it emerged that HMRC had lost £47 million after a phishing scam breached tens of thousands of tax accounts. Senior civil servants at HMRC told the Treasury Committee that 100,000 people have been contacted, or are in the process of being contacted, after their accounts were locked down in what they said was an 'organised crime' incident which started last year. On Tuesday, the committee published a letter from the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) stipulating that it had not discussed the phishing incident with HMRC and was not aware of it prior to the hearing on June 4. The committee also published a letter sent via email from its chairwoman Dame Meg Hillier to John-Paul Marks, chief executive, HMRC. The letter said: 'I am alarmed that it was never deemed necessary to inform Parliament about an issue which affected such a vast number of taxpayers and led to the loss of £47 million of public money. 'To discover this information during a session from press reports and without adequate time for the committee to review the information in detail is unacceptable.' The letter said the committee is seeking responses from HMRC as to 'why was Parliament not notified earlier about the loss of £47 million of taxpayers' money, whether through a written ministerial statement and/or public or confidential letters to the Treasury Committee and the Public Accounts Committee?' The committee is also seeking responses over why the update was published on the day of the committee hearing on the work of HMRC and who else in Government was told about the incident and when. It also wants to receive a timeline of how the incident unfolded and find out what measures HMRC has put in place to ensure that such incidents do not happen in future. The letter asked for a reply by June 24 2025. Meanwhile, the letter from Glenn Collins, head of technical and strategic engagement, ACCA, to Dame Meg, dated June 5, said: 'While we regularly engage with HMRC, including earlier in the year about issues relating to agent account access, we have not received any communication from HMRC on the issue of taxpayer account breaches until yesterday. 'We have highlighted to HMRC our frustration that HMRC has not been transparent or timely in its communication over this important issue.'
BBC News
15 minutes ago
- BBC News
Family visa income threshold should be lower, review says
The minimum income threshold for family visas should be relaxed, a government-commissioned review has recommended.A report by the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) has suggested a reduction from the current level of £29, warned against previous proposals to raise the threshold to the same level as for skilled workers - £38,700 a year - saying it could breach the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).The Conservatives said that the UK should leave the ECHR if it "stops us from setting our own visa rules". Article 8 of the ECHR enshrines the right to family threshold is the minimum income a British citizen or settled resident must earn to bring their partner to join them in the UK. If the partner is already in the UK on a valid visa, their income also counts towards the minimum applications are made by people not already living in the UK. The MAC suggested a range of possible new thresholds. It said a level between £23,000 to £25,000 would enable families to support themselves.A threshold of between £24,000 to £28,000 meanwhile would put more emphasis on economic wellbeing - both of the families themselves and for said it did "not understand the rationale" for setting the family visa threshold at the £38,700 level for skilled workers, as the two visas have "completely different objective[s]".A £38,700 level would be the "most likely to conflict with international law and obligations".It is the government's decision whether to accept any of the MAC's recommendations. Prof Brian Bell, chairman of the MAC, said that balancing family life and economic wellbeing was a "real trade-off"."There is a cost to the UK economy and UK taxpayers of having this route, and we should just be honest about that and say there is a trade-off," he said."But similarly, on the other side, people who say 'we should set it at very high numbers to make sure that we don't lose any money' ignore the massive impact that has on families and the destruction of some relationships and the harm it causes to children." A higher threshold would also have a "negative impact on the family life of a larger number of people", the MAC said. It noted many families with lower incomes still earn enough to support themselves even if they do not make a net positive fiscal impact on the said an adult would need to earn £27,800 to have a neutral impact on the public finances - and £40,400 for a couple to have no impact in the first year a spouse arrived in the MAC did not recommend a higher threshold for families with children, saying the impacts on family life for them would be "particularly significant". In 2023 the previous Conservative government announced plans to raise the salary threshold to £38,700, as part of plans to cut the level of they backed down following criticism that this would keep families apart, settling on a £29,000 threshold with plans to gradually increase it did not implement those further rises when the party came into government and asked the MAC to review the committee said the threshold of £29,000 was already high compared to other high-income countries it had looked at. The MAC said it "was not possible to predict with any confidence" the impact different thresholds would have on the level of net migration - the difference between those entering and leaving the did suggest lowering the threshold from £29,000 to roughly £24,000 may increase net migration by up to 8,000 migration in 2024 was an estimated 431,000 people, down almost 50% on the previous followed record high levels in recent years, with the government under political pressure to get numbers down further. The MAC also criticised the Home Office for its data collection, saying insufficient data "greatly hindered" their review.A Home Office spokesperson said the government was considering the review's findings and would respond in due course. Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp said migration figures remain too high and that the government "must urgently re-instate the Conservative plan to further increase the salary threshold"."If the ECHR stops us from setting our own visa rules, from deporting foreign criminals or from putting Britain's interests first, then we should leave the ECHR," he ECHR, which was established in 1950, sets out the rights and freedoms people are entitled to in the 46 signatory countries and is a central part of UK human rights month, the government said it would bring forward legislation to clarify how aspects of the ECHR should apply in immigration cases.
The Guardian
20 minutes ago
- The Guardian
What's behind Keir Starmer's decision to back nuclear power?
Keir Starmer has committed the UK to its first significant stake in a new nuclear power plant since the 1980s. The decision to invest almost £18bn of taxpayer money into the Sizewell C nuclear power plant in Suffolk was welcomed by Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, as the beginning of a 'golden age' of nuclear investment that would be critical to the government's net zero goals. The government said on Tuesday it would commit £14.2bn to the project, including the £2.7bn it earmarked for Sizewell C in the autumn budget. It has already committed £3.6bn to Sizewell over the past two years. Britain's nuclear renaissance will also include spending about £2.5bn of taxpayer money building some of Europe's first small modular reactors (SMR), after the government gave the green light to plans for Rolls-Royce to build three in the UK by the early 2030s. For critics, the technology's high costs and lengthy construction time have always eclipsed the benefits of abundant low-carbon electricity, given Hinkley Point C's current price tag of up to £35bn and repeated delays. There are also persistent concerns over the safety of nuclear reactors, and the disposal of nuclear waste. But questions over whether countries can meet the growing demand for electricity without fossil fuels, and avoid blackouts, mean many governments now believe nuclear represents a price worth paying. Megawatt for megawatt, nuclear power is far more expensive than most renewable energy technologies. But, unlike wind and solar farms, nuclear reactors do not need investment in battery backup technologies to provide a steady, reliable source of low-carbon power. The guaranteed electricity price offered to Hinkley Point C was initially £92 per megawatt-hour but this will fall to £89.50/MWh with the go-ahead for Sizwell C, under the terms of the government's contract with French state-owned EDF. By contrast, the guaranteed price for offshore windfarms which were successful in last year's subsidy auction was just under £59 per megawatt-hour. 'The upfront cost [of nuclear] is undoubtedly high,' said Dr Iain Staffell, an associate professor at Imperial College London. '£14bn could fund around 10 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind versus just 3.2 GW of nuclear. But, these reactors will run day and night, especially valuable when the wind is not blowing.' Prof Mark Wenman, also at Imperial College London, added that the costs needed to be balanced against the fact that these reactors 'will produce low carbon electricity for 80 or possibly 100 years, 24/7, providing around a 10th of the current UK electricity needs'. 'Once paid for, nuclear reactors produce the cheapest electricity of any kind, so this investment should be seen as future-proofing the UK electricity system,' Wenman said. Experts believe that powering a country on 100% renewable energy is technically possible. But there is clear evidence that grid systems running predominantly on wind and solar power can be more expensive in the long run, and could be at higher risk of blackouts. This is because renewable energy cannot help to keep the electrical frequency of the grid stable at around 50Hz in the same way that the spinning turbines of a power plants have done in the past by creating inertia. The answer, according to the government's National Energy System Operator (Neso), is to encourage renewables to become the backbone of the energy system while keeping alternatives such as nuclear, biomass and gas to provide backup for when renewable resources are low and grid stability is needed. The government's independent climate advisers agree. The Climate Change Committee recommends that the UK's nuclear capacity doubles by 2050 because while it is 'relatively expensive on a levelised cost basis' it can provide 'valuable zero-carbon generation at scale'. Britain risks losing the benefits offered by nuclear plants by shutting its ageing nuclear reactors faster than it can build new ones – leaving a gap in the UK's supplies of low-carbon electricity at a time when demand for clean energy is growing. The UK's five existing nuclear power reactors generated 14% of the country's electricity last year – down from the industry's late-1990s peak when 18 nuclear reactors provided more than a quarter of Britain's power. Four of these plants are due to close before the end of the decade, even with plans to extend their lifetimes, while only one nuclear power plant is under construction. The Hinkley Point C project in Somerset was originally due to begin generating electricity by 2017 but it has been delayed until the early 2030s. Driving Britain's nuclear renaissance is the tech industry's appetite for nuclear power. Starmer unveiled plans for a once-in-a-generation nuclear expansion earlier this year alongside an open invitation to tech companies such as Google, Meta and Amazon to invest in AI datacentres in Britain, which could be powered by small modular reactors. This is because world's biggest tech companies are investing in extending the life of nuclear plants and building small modular reactors to help meet the enormous power demands of their datacentres. This growing demand is expected to accelerate with the adoption of artificial intelligence. Earlier this month Meta struck a deal to keep one nuclear reactor of a US utility company in Illinois operating for an extra 20 years to help supply the company's datacentres with low-carbon power. It follows a similar deal from Google to supply its datacentres with nuclear power from half-dozen small reactors built by a California utility company. In addition, Microsoft has paid for the restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the site of the most serious nuclear accident and radiation leak in US history. 'They are very keen to get the datacentres in and they're very alive to the fact that the power is a big issue,' Starmer said.
