Two men have been charged with a plot to kill British Prime Minister Theresa May and a hearing was held at Westminster Magistrates Court yesterday, British media reports said.
Naa’imur Zakariyah Rahman, 20, and Mohammed Aqib Imran, 21, planned to blow up security barriers outside May’s Downing Street office and then stab the British leader to death, they said.
The two men were arrested on Tuesday last week following a joint operation involving MI5 investigators and counterterrorism police officers from Scotland Yard and the West Midlands.
The reports came a day after British Home Secretary Amber Rudd told parliament that 22 Islamist terror plots had been thwarted since the killing of a British soldier on a London street by two Muslim extremists in 2013.
Nine of the plots have been uncovered following an attack outside the British parliament in March in which five people were killed, Rudd said.
“The UK is facing an intense threat from terrorism, one which is multidimensional, evolving rapidly and operating at a scale and pace we have not seen before,” London’s Metropolitan Police said on Tuesday.
The police said there were now 500 counterterrorism investigations involving 3,000 people and more than 20,000 other people have been investigated in the past.
Britain has seen five terror attacks this year, which killed 36 people and injured more than 200 others. Four of them were claimed by the Islamic State group.
Three of the perpetrators were known to security services, according to an internal review which said opportunities to stop the Manchester Arena bombing attack were missed by security services.
That review of the counterterrorism performance by British police and intelligence services was released on Tuesday and suggested that the Manchester attack might have been prevented if information had been handled differently.
The review by lawyer David Anderson, ordered by Rudd, said the May 22 attack that killed 22 people might have been thwarted “had the cards fallen differently.”
Nonetheless, he credits police and the MI5 domestic intelligence service with stopping most attacks at a time when Britain faces an unprecedented level of extremist activity.
“MI5 and counterterrorism policing got a great deal right — particularly in the case of Manchester, they could have succeeded had the cards fallen differently,” Anderson said.
Some of these details had been known before, but Anderson raised the tantalizing prospect that MI5 might have been able to prevent the most lethal atrocity — the concert attack — had it handled information differently.
The reports says Manchester bomber Salman Abedi was not being actively investigated when he detonated a suicide device, although he had been scrutinized in the past.
However, Anderson says MI5 obtained unspecified intelligence in the months before the attack that might have led to an active investigation of Abedi “had its true significance been properly understood.”
He said it is not clear whether such an investigation would have led to Abedi’s plan being prevented and that MI5 believes it would not have thwarted the bomber.
Greater Manchester Police Chief Ian Hopkins and other officials said they welcome Anderson’s report.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema