Anti-terror operations difficult to keep on top of for the authorities

Anti-terror operations difficult to keep on top of for the authorities

The tempo of anti-terror operations in the UK has reached unprecedented levels.

The Parsons Green explosion is just the latest in a huge stack of live investigations now being handled by the police and security services.

There are around 500 ongoing investigations at any given time - and more than 3,000 individuals are classed as potentially "violent extremists."

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Kevin Hurley used to head terrorism investigations at the City of London Police.


He said there is a more wide-reaching threat now than there was, even at the height of al Qaeda's power more than a decade ago.

And for the authorities, it's enormously difficult to keep on top of.

"With 3,000 known extremists and another 20,000 they're concerned with, there simply isn't the resources," he said.

"The reality of it is 4,000 or 5,000 people in total in the security services. The total anti-terrorism effort for the whole country is probably another few thousand officers. You simply cannot keep tabs on those numbers."

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By any measure, this past year has been exceptional - five terror attacks and even more terror plots foiled.

After initially saying the terror threat level would remain at severe, the Prime Minister has said this is now going to be increased to critical - meaning a further attack may be imminent.

Raffaello Pantucci, director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), said: "At the moment, the threat picture you're looking at is so diffuse, so scattered, so varied and so basic that it becomes very difficult for authorities to stay on top of it entirely.

"When you see attacks getting through, this gives the impression of success which gives the impression that the ideology will sort of continue."

There is no doubt, the predominant terror threat is Islamist related, but it is not the only source the authorities have to be concerned about.

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Security analyst Duncan Gardham said: "There's all kinds of different threats that they face these days.

"Clearly Islamist terrorism is the prime one and the one they spend most of their time trying to track.

"There's right-wing terrorists and also individuals that may have mental health problems that sometimes try and do this sort of thing.

"The nature of the device that we're looking at is amateurish, but you can learn these sort of techniques off the internet."

Rest days for those working in counter-terrorism are rare at the moment and depressingly, senior officers tell us that the threat picture is likely to remain unchanged for some time to come.