British security forces handling over 700 live terror probes: Scotland Yard

Britain's security forces are dealing with a record high of over 700 live anti-terror investigations, Scotland Yard's Indian-origin counter-terrorism chief Neil Basu has told an influential committee of the UK Parliament.

The Metropolitan Police Lead for Counter-Terrorism and the Head of its Specialist Operations said the over-riding threat to the UK remains from terrorist groups like the Islamic State but, Islamist and far-right terrorism are "both feeding each other" as the country's terror threat levels escalate.

"Across the counter-terrorism network at the moment, we are recording a record high of over 700 investigations," said Assistant Commissioner Basu, in his evidence before the UK Parliament's Home Affairs Select Committee on Wednesday.

 

He also revealed that since the ISIS-claimed attack on the UK's Parliament complex in March last year, the security forces have prevented 17 terror attacks directed against Britain, four of which were extreme right-wing terrorist plots.

"The overriding threat to the UK remains from those inspired by Daesh (ISIS) and the resurgent al-Qaeda, but our operations reflect a much broader range of dangerous ideologies, including very disturbingly rising extreme right-wing activity," he said.

The counter-terror chief told cross-party MPs of the House of Commons' influential committee that around 80 per cent of investigations by the UK's police and MI5 intelligence service were looking into Islamist threats and 20 per cent fell into the category of "other", which included a "significant proportion from the right-wing".

"We are seeing across Europe far-right activity increasing and there's no doubt that crosses the border into the UK," he said.

Basu also indicated that the security services were "not matched" to the current terror threat levels and require a longer-term funding approach in the wake of the series of terror attacks targeting the UK last year.

"Those attacks were not a temporary escalation of the threat. They are a sustained shift in that threat. The UK counter-terrorism machine continues to run red hot," he said.

The senior police official also made a "plea" to technology companies to do more to help combat the terror threat by reporting extremist material posted online and not just removing it without reporting it to the police.

"It would help us enormously if social media companies were to take the burden away from us and report to us what we need to investigate," he said.

Basu named social media as the "greatest single difference in ramping up the terror threat regardless of the ideology," adding: "We have to be as clinical in getting hateful posts removed from the extreme right-wing as well as we have been from the Islamists".

Sara Khan, the government's Lead Commissioner for countering extremism, updated the parliamentary committee on her commission's UK-wide research on all types of extremism.

"We need to step back and look at the wider spectrum of extremism. We don't understand the wider harms of extremism. As part of our study, we will be evaluating current responses, including current programmes and assessing the current legal toolbox," she added.