By Michael Holden
LONDON (Reuters) -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.
(Reporting by Michael Holden; Editing by Aidan Lewis)
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