Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Al Qaeda member in Pakistan discusses future attacks on England

Times Online:

Al-Qaeda is increasingly recruiting teenagers in the United Kingdom as young as 15 and grooming them to carry out attacks in this country, the head of MI5 revealed today.

In his first public speech since taking over as Director-General of MI5 in April, Jonathan Evans painted an alarming picture of youngsters being radicalised by al-Qaeda’s recruiters.

He said that the teenage recruits were among up to 4,000 people now suspected by MI5 of being involved in terrorist activities.

“As I speak, terrorists are methodically and intentionally targeting young people and children in this country. They are radicalising, indoctrinating and grooming young, vulnerable people to carry out acts of terrorism,” he said in an address to the Society of Editors in Manchester.

He added: “This year, we have seen individuals as young as 15 and 16 implicated in terrorist-related activity.”

Mr Evans, 49, has taken up where Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, his predecessor, left off during her time as head of MI5. She, too, warned of the intensive efforts made by al-Qaeda to recruit support for its cause in the UK, and disclosed that her service was aware of and watching 1,600 terrorist suspects.

Mr Evans who has spent much of his career in MI5 in counter-terrorism, revealed that that figure had now jumped to “at least 2,000”.

However, adding that the figure was more likely to be double that, he said: “We suspect that there are as many again that we don’t yet know of.”

Underlining the pressures placed on his service and the police in trying to counter the growing threat, he said there had been more than 200 terrorist convictions in the UK since the attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001.

Mr Evans also revealed that al-Qaeda’s concentrated campaign against the UK was now being orchestrated not just from the tribal regions of Pakistan but from several other countries around the world, and he identified Somalia, Iraq and Algeria. This new development, he said, had emerged within the last 12 months.

In the last five years, much of the command, control and “inspiration for attack planning in the UK” had derived from al-Qaeda’s remaining core leadership in the tribal areas of Pakistan, the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan – “often using young British citizens to mount the actual attack”.

He added: “Worryingly, we have more recently seen similar processes emerging elsewhere. For instance, there is no doubt now that al-Qaeda in Iraq aspires to promote terrorist attacks outside Iraq.”

His acknowledgement of the Iraq connection to terrorist attacks in other parts of the world confirmed the prediction made by the Cabinet Office Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The JIC gave a warning that if the invasion went ahead it would lead to an increase in the terrorist threat facing the UK.

Mr Evans said that apart from Iraq, there was “training activity and terrorist planning” going on in East Africa, particularly Somalia - “which is focused on the UK”.

The so-called al-Qaeda “franchise” had also spread to other countries, such as Algeria.

“This sort of extension of the al-Qaeda brand to new parts of the Middle East and beyond poses a further threat to us in this country because it provides al-Qaeda with access to new centres of support which it can motivate and exploit, including in its campaign against the UK,” he said.

Since 9/11 there had also been a number of examples of “serious al-Qaeda-related terrorist activity in Europe”; and in the last 12 months there had been an increase in attack planning across the continent, including in Germany, Denmark and Austria.

Mr Evans said it was matter of disappointment to him that with such threats facing the UK, he was still having to divert “significant amounts of equipment, money and staff” to dealing with espionage operations run by the Russians and Chinese.

“They are resources which I would far rather devote to countering the threat from international terrorism,” he said.

The Russians and Chinese, in particular he said, were increasingly using sophisticated technical means to spy on the UK, “using the internet to penetrate computer networks”.

However, with an increase in funding provided in the latest Comprehensive Spending Review, Mr Evans disclosed that he now planned to boost MI5’s staffing levels to 4,000 by 2011. Under previous plans announced by Dame Eliza, MI5’s manpower was in the process of being increased to 3,500 by next year.

Mr Evans said with eight regional MI5 offices now set up, 25 per cent of the staff would be working outside the London headquarters at Thames House in Millbank, London, by 2011.

He said recruiting was going well, but he was concerned about a drop in the number of women applying to join MI5. “This is a paradox, considering that two of the last three directors-general were women [Dame Eliza, and before her, Dame Stella Rimington], so we are now exploring ways to remedy this,” he said.