The Met have said there is ‘nothing to suggest an increased threat in London’ but policing has been stepped up
Almost 24-hours after a car ramming and stabbing attack at a synagogue in Manchester, specialist Counter Terror Policing teams will be working hard to establish exactly what happened. Yesterday outside New Scotland Yard, the home of the Met’s SO15 Counter Terror Policing command, Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor declared ‘this as a terrorist incident’.
With the knifeman Jihad Al-Shamie, 35, a British citizen of Syrian descent, shot dead at the scene, and a device around his waist that appeared to be a bomb declared ‘not viable’, police are now on high-alert for copycat attacks. Two people have been declared dead, three more seriously injured, while three people — two men in their thirties and a woman in her sixties — have been arrested.
MI5 and the London-based Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) have assessed the current threat at SUBSTANTIAL since February 2022, down from SEVERE. This means an attack is likely. The threat level was last deemed CRITICAL in May 2017 in the days after the Manchester Arena bombing which killed 22 people. JTAC are understood to be considering whether to raise it again.
The rating goes like this:
- LOW – an attack is highly unlikely
- MODERATE – an attack is possible, but not likely
- SUBSTANTIAL – an attack is likely
- SEVERE – an attack is highly likely
- CRITICAL – an attack is highly likely in the near future
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has warned that antisemitic hatred is ‘rising once again’ as police have been deployed to protect Jewish sites across the country. Last night the Mayor of London Sir Sadiq Khan confirmed police will be ‘stepping up high visibility policing’ around London synagogues, though the Met has said there is ‘nothing to suggest an increased threat’.
In April, a man was charged with a terrorism offence after allegedly attempting to break into the Israeli embassy in Kensington with a knife. In February 2020, a man was shot dead by police after stabbing two people in Streatham High Road, days after his release from prison for distributing extremist material. The London Bridge terror attack in 2019 was the last time people were killed in the capital.
Though there is thought to be no ongoing threat to the public, a key line of inquiry for investigators after yesterday’s attack in Manchester will be whether the attacker acted alone. Grandiose 9/11-style plots directed from overseas have become rare, with individuals now usually radicalised online and inspired to carry out lone wolf attacks.
Security services have also acknowledged the effects of the Israel-Gaza war. Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, said two years ago: “There clearly is the possibility that profound events in the Middle East will either generate more volume of UK threat, and/or change its shape in terms of what is being targeted, in terms of how people are taking inspiration.”
While media focus will be on Islamist extremism, police will also be on alert for attacks from other radical wings. Weeks after the last major attack in Manchester on an Ariana Grande concert, hate-filled Darren Osborne drove a van into a crowd of worshippers attending Ramadan prayers outside Finsbury Park mosque shouting ‘I want to kill all Muslims’, killing one and injuring nine.
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