Russia, Iran and China intensifying life-threatening operations in UK, police say
Russia, Iran and China are behind a growing number of life-threatening operations in Britain including attacks and kidnappings, often deploying criminals and sometimes children as proxies, two senior British police officers said on Tuesday.
The British authorities in recent years have repeatedly voiced concern at what they said was malign activity by the three states in Britain, ranging from traditional espionage and actions to undermine the state, to sabotage and assassinations.
Those accusations have been rejected by Moscow, Beijing and Tehran, which say they are politically motivated.
On Tuesday, the two British officers said told reporters there had been a fivefold increase in hostile state activity since the Novichok nerve agent poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2017, which London says was carried out by Russian spies.
Dominic Murphy, who heads up London's Counter Terrorism Command, said the breadth, complexity and volume of hostile operations from Russia, Iran and China had grown at a rate neither they nor their international partners nor any intelligence community had predicted.
"We are increasingly seeing these three states ... undertaking threat-to-life operations in the United Kingdom," he told reporters.
In most instances, proxies, usually criminals acting quite often for small amounts of cash, were carrying out the states' work for them, said Vicki Evans, the Senior National Coordinator for UK Counter Terrorism Policing.
The proxies also included vulnerable people or those who felt disenfranchised, with those aged in their mid teens among those arrested or under investigation.
"We are concerned that they might find themselves in an online environment where they're encouraged or egged on to do something and don't understand what they're being asked to do," said Evans, adding they were less concerned that the children were ideologically motivated.
Earlier this month, three men were convicted over an arson attack on Ukraine-linked businesses in London, which police said had been ordered by Russia's Wagner mercenary group. Their ringleader had earlier admitted plotting to kidnap a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Last year, the head of Britain's domestic spy agency MI5 said that, since January 2022, there had been 20 Iran-backed plots to kidnap or kill British nationals or individuals based in Britain who Tehran regarded as a threat.
"We know that they are continuing to try and sow violence on the streets of the United Kingdom, they too are to some extent relying on criminal proxies to do that," Murphy said of Iran.
© Thomson Reuters 2025.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Japan Times
an hour ago
- Japan Times
The 'Trump Doctrine' is wishful thinking
U.S. Vice President JD Vance recently tried to cast President Donald Trump's strikes on Iran's nuclear infrastructure as a wildly successful example of the 'Trump Doctrine.' According to Vance, the doctrine is simple: you identify a problem that threatens U.S. interests, which 'you try to aggressively diplomatically solve.' If diplomacy fails, 'you use overwhelming military power to solve it and then you get the hell out of there before it ever becomes a protracted conflict.' If only it were that easy. What Vance describes is neither a doctrine nor unique to Trump. It is the same wishful thinking that produced many of the long, costly and unsuccessful U.S. military interventions that Vance himself has often decried. If Vance thinks that the strikes 'solved' the problem of Iran's nuclear program, then he must believe that they fully destroyed Iran's nuclear capabilities: its centrifuges, its stocks of enriched uranium and any other materials used for weaponization. Either that, or he views this display of America's military might as powerful enough to persuade the Islamic Republic to abandon its nuclear program and not reconstitute it in the future. There is no question that the U.S. strike severely damaged the Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear facilities. But it is far from clear that the bombing of these sites, coupled with Israel's assassination of senior Iranian nuclear scientists, has set Iran back to zero. It appears more likely that Iran's program has only been delayed, though estimates of the setback vary from months to years. Unless and until there is sufficient evidence to support the claim that Iran's nuclear program was completely obliterated, then Vance must rely on the belief that, as U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth put it, 'American deterrence is back.' The Trump administration is not the first to be tempted by the idea that short, sharp displays of military strength can convince other countries to capitulate to U.S. demands. Since achieving its unquestioned military primacy in 1990, the United States has compiled a long record of such attempts, many of which failed. Some targets of U.S. military coercion proved willing to tolerate more pain than American officials anticipated. Throughout the 1990s, Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq endured multiple U.S.-led bombing campaigns for repeatedly obstructing International Atomic Energy Agency and United Nations weapons inspectors. This cycle, as Vance knows well, culminated in 2003 with America's 'shock and awe' campaign, which set off a grinding eight-year war that killed thousands of U.S. service members and roughly a half-million Iraqis. Similarly, in the 1990s, NATO's threats, blockades and shows of force did not deter Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic from waging brutal wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. In particular, Milosevic was unmoved by NATO's early bombing campaign in Kosovo, which was restricted to military targets and did not threaten his hold on power. The air strikes that were supposed to last a matter of days ended up continuing for months without success. The presumption, in other words, that simply bringing superior force to bear would convince Milosevic to abandon a cause he was deeply committed to was dead wrong. It was only when NATO shifted from targeting Serbian forces to targeting infrastructure in and around Belgrade — which threatened to undermine the Serbian elite's support for Milosevic — that he agreed to leave Kosovo. Other targets have played possum when faced with U.S. military threats, seeming to concede in the moment before resuming their unwanted behaviors weeks, months, or even years later. North Korea has long taken this approach. Despite repeated reminders of the U.S. military's overwhelming strength, the country eventually resorts to its old ways, issuing nuclear threats, conducting missile tests, launching satellites and engaging in other provocations. China's behavior follows a similar pattern. In 2016, America successfully used an ostentatious joint military exercise to deter Chinese island building and claims around the Philippines. But just a few months ago, the Chinese Coast Guard landed on an island that the Philippines claims as its own. Still others have responded by inflicting pain on the U.S. The Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid found that killing a few Americans is all it takes for the world's most powerful military to back down. Iran seems willing to do all three. The Islamic Republic has displayed an ability to absorb both economic and military blows. Its military provocations and nuclear activities have ebbed and flowed, sometimes in sync with — and other times irrespective of — the intensity of U.S. responses. And as Iran expert Vali Nasr recently recounted, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei apparently shares Aidid's assessment, having told his advisers that 'America is like a dog. If you back off, it will lunge at you, but if you lunge at it, it will recoil and back off.' It is understandable that Vance wants to believe — and wants Trump's anti-interventionist constituency to believe — that impressive demonstrations of the U.S. military's reach and power are uniquely persuasive. But if short-of-war displays of military power were sufficient to achieve U.S. political objectives — especially ones as difficult to achieve as convincing Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions — then they would be a pillar of every president's doctrine. Melanie W. Sisson, senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, is co-editor of "Military Coercion and U.S. Foreign Policy: The Use of Force Short of War" (Routledge, 2020) and author of "The United States, China, and the Competition for Control" (Routledge, 2024). © Project Syndicate, 2025
.JPG%3Fwidth%3D780%26fit%3Dcover%26gravity%3Dfaces%26dpr%3D2%26quality%3Dmedium%26source%3Dnar-cms%26format%3Dauto&w=3840&q=100)
Nikkei Asia
2 hours ago
- Nikkei Asia
India chides 'double standards' of NATO's Russian oil threats
Russia accounted for 38% of India's total oil imports in 2024 and remains the South Asian nation's top supplier. © Reuters KIRAN SHARMA NEW DELHI -- Dismissing NATO chief Mark Rutte's warning that countries like India, China and Brazil could be hit by secondary sanctions for continuing to buy Russian oil, New Delhi has said that "securing energy needs of our people is understandably an overriding priority for us." "In this endeavor, we are guided by what is there on offer in the markets, as also by the prevailing global circumstances," Randhir Jaiswal, spokesperson at India's Ministry of External Affairs, said during a weekly media briefing on Thursday evening.
Asahi Shimbun
5 hours ago
- Asahi Shimbun
North Korea bans foreign tourists to newly opened beach resort
SEOUL--North Korea is suspending the entry of foreign tourists to a recently opened mega beach resort, a move that dims prospects for the complex that leader Kim Jong Un hailed it as 'one of the greatest successes this year.' DPR Korea Tour, a website run by North Korea's tourism authorities, said in a notice Wednesday that the eastern coastal Wonsan-Kalma tourist complex 'is temporarily not receiving foreign tourists.' It gave no further details including why a ban was established or how long it would last. North Korea says the complex can accommodate nearly 20,000 guests. The resort opened to domestic tourists July 1 before receiving a small group of Russian tourists last week. Observers expected North Korea to open the resort to Chinese tourists while largely blocking other international tourists. The announcement came after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov flew to the complex to meet Kim and Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui for talks last weekend. North Korea and Russia have sharply expanded military and other cooperation in recent years, with North Korea supplying weapons and troops to back Russia's war against Ukraine. During a meeting with Choe, Lavrov promised to take steps to support Russian travel to the zone. 'I am sure that Russian tourists will be increasingly eager to come here,' he said. But experts say North Korea likely decided to halt foreigner travels to the zone, including visits by Russians, because of a newspaper article by a Russian reporter who traveled with Lavrov that implied North Koreans at the zone appeared to be mobilized by authorities and not real tourists. 'The North Korean government is believed to have determined that it would face some negative consequences when it opens the site to foreigners,' said Oh Gyeong-seob, an analyst at Seoul's Korea Institute for National Unification. Lee Sangkeun of Seoul's Institute for National Security Strategy said the ban could be associated with difficulties in recruiting Russian tourists because many would consider the zone too far away and expensive. Experts say North Korea must open the Wonsan-Kalma zone, the country's biggest tourist complex, to Russian and Chinese tourists after what was likely a huge construction and operational expenditure from the country's tight budget. 'If foreign tourists aren't allowed to the site, no Russian rubles, Chinese yuans and dollars won't come in. Then, North Korea can't break even and it has to shut down the resort,' said Ahn Chan-il, head of the World Institute for North Korean Studies think tank in Seoul. Kim has said the site would be 'one of the greatest successes this year' and 'the proud first step' in tourism development. North Korea's state media reports the Wonsan-Kalma site has been crowded with local tourists. North Korea has been slowly easing the curbs imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic and reopening its borders in phases. But the country hasn't said if it would fully resume international tourism. Chinese group tours, which made up more than 90% of visitors before the pandemic, remain stalled. In February, North Korea allowed a small group of international tourists to visit the northeastern city of Rason, only to stop the program in less than a month.
