ISIS planning terror attacks on Britain, says national head of counter-terrorism

Mark Rowley, the national head of counter-terrorism, has said the Islamic State wants to inflict an enormous and spectacular terrorist atrocity on Britain and may have trained people to carry out the attacks.

Speaking at a press conference, Rowley said the nature of the threat from ISIS, which he calls Daesh, was changing.

"In recent months, we've seen a broadening of that, much more plans to attack western lifestyle. Going from that narrow focus on police and military as symbols of the state to something much broader. And you see a terrorist group which has big ambitions for enormous and spectacular attacks, not just the types that we've seen foiled to date," the Guardian quoted him as saying.

Rowley, a Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner, asserted that they still want to kill soldiers or the police and now posed a real danger of attacking western lifestyle targets.

The police in the region have stepped up vigilance since the Paris attacks in November last year in which many were killed.

He said that the ISIS targeted those people as recruits with mental illness, to such extend that that one counter-terrorism unit was now working with a trained psychologist.

He also pressed that the number of women and teenagers being drawn were increasing.

There were a record 339 arrests under counter-terrorism laws in 2015, 77 percent of which were British nationals, 14 percent were female and 13 percent were aged 20 and under, according to reports.