By Michael Holden
LONDON (Reuters) -Iran poses a significant and wide-ranging threat to Britain and, while not in the same league as Russia or China, it is one that is rising and for which the UK government is not fully prepared, British lawmakers said in a report released on Thursday.
Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee said the Iranian threat varied from physical attacks on and potential assassinations of dissidents and Jewish targets, to espionage, offensive cyber capabilities and its attempt to develop nuclear weapons.
“Iran is there across the full spectrum of all the kinds of threats we have to be concerned with,” the committee chair, Kevan Jones, said in a statement.
“We remain concerned that the government’s policy on Iran has been focused on crisis management and has been primarily driven by concerns over Iran’s nuclear programme – to the exclusion of other issues.”
Iran’s embassy in London did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The committee said the British government should fully examine whether it would be practicable to proscribe Iran’s hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, an action that some lawmakers have long called for.
Although the evidence given to the committee concluded in August 2023, the lawmakers said their recommendations about action the government should take remained relevant.
Last year, the head of Britain’s domestic spy agency MI5 said that, since January 2022, his service and British police had responded to 20 Iran-backed plots to kidnap or kill British nationals or individuals based in Britain who were regarded by Tehran as a threat.
Iran reacted to that speech by rejecting what it said were repetitive accusations by British security officials.
In March, Britain said it would require the Iranian state to register everything it does to exert political influence in the UK, subjecting Tehran to an elevated tier of scrutiny in light of what it said was increasingly aggressive activity.
British security services say Tehran uses criminal proxies to carry out its work in Britain.
In December, two Romanians were charged after a journalist working for a Persian language media organisation in London was stabbed in the leg, while just last month three Iranian men appeared in court charged with assisting Iran’s foreign intelligence service and plotting violence against journalists.
(Reporting by Michael Holden; editing by William James and Alex Richardson)
Comments