Ken McCallum, who leads the U.K.’s domestic security service, said Tehran is seeking to intensify its attacks in Britain beyond the traditional targets of Iranians opposed to the country's Islamic authorities.
That has included arson and sabotage attacks on Jewish sites that Britain says were carried out by Iranian proxies.
McCallum said another “major shift this year has been Iranian ambitions to come at harder targets, like military sites.”
The incident at RAF Fairford “is not unique. There have been other examples, not just in the U.K. but around the world,” McCallum said.
McCallum delivered his annual speech outlining major threats to the U.K. as counterterror detectives investigate a suspected terror plot against the U.S.-run base in western England, which has been used to bomb Iran during this year’s war.
Scores of residents were evacuated from their homes near the base on Sept. 27 as armed police officers and army bomb-disposal experts swarmed the rural area. Police later said they had found a quantity of an accelerant — gasoline — in three vans at the site, but no explosives.
Seven men in their 20s have been arrested and released on bail under investigation. In all, more than 50 people have been arrested over Iran-linked plots in the past year, McCallum said.
The U.S. pulled its bombers from RAF Fairford after the incident, and the Trump administration said it believed the base faced Iranian threats intended to kill as many American troops and destroy as many U.S. planes as possible.
