MI5 Director, Andrew Parker warns of ‘intense’ terror threat that can be ‘harder to detect’

Andrew Parker of the Security Service said UK Intelligence are facing an ‘intense’ terrorism  challenge.

The head of MI5 has now warned that the UK’s Intelligence services are facing an ‘intense’ challenge from terrorism.

Andrew Parker said there was currently ‘more terrorist activity coming at us, more quickly’ and that it can also be ‘harder to detect’. To date, the UK has suffered five terror attacks this year, and he said MI5 staff had been “deeply affected” by them.

He also added that more than 130 Britons who travelled to Iraq and Syria to fight with so-called Islamic State had died. MI5 was running 500 live operations involving 3,000 individuals involved in extremist activity in some way, he said.

Speaking in London, Mr Parker said the tempo of counter-terrorism operations was the highest he had seen in his 34-year career at MI5. Twenty attacks had been foiled in the last four years, including seven in the last seven months, he said – all related to what he called Islamist extremism.

The five attacks that got through this year included a suicide bomb attack after an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena in May, killing 22. Five people were also killed in April during an attack near the Houses of Parliament, while eight people were killed when three attackers drove a van into pedestrians on London Bridge and launched a knife attack in Borough Market.
A man then drove a van into a crowd of worshippers near a mosque in north London in June, while a homemade bomb partially exploded in tube train at Parsons Green station last month, injuring 30 people.

In some cases, individuals like Khuram Butt – who was behind the London Bridge attack – were well known to MI5 and had been under investigation by the security services.

Flowers lay at St Anne’s Square in Manchester

News Source – BBC News