Soldiers will begin to be withdrawn from key sites at end of bank holiday weekend as Operation Temperer is scaled back

The terror threat level in the UK has been reduced from critical to severe and soldiers deployed to key sites around the country will begin to be withdrawn from Monday, Theresa May has said.

The prime minister said Operation Temperer, in which military personnel were deployed to bolster security in the wake of the Manchester bombing, would be scaled back after the bank holiday weekend.

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Security officials had advised the government to raise the terror threat to critical, which means they believe an attack is imminent, after a suicide bomber killed 22 people, including children, at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester on Monday. Additional resources were deployed to help with the investigation into the attack and provide greater security at a host of weekend events. It is normal for a critical terror threat level to be maintained for just a few days.

May said: “The public should be clear about what this means. A threat level of severe means an attack remains highly likely. The country should remain vigilant.” Speaking after a meeting of the government’s Cobra emergency committee on Saturday, she said the decision had been taken after “a significant amount of police activity” over the last 24 hours.

The Manchester bombing was the worst terror attack to hit Britain since the 7 July attacks in London in 2005.

On Saturday a street in Manchester’s Moss Side was evacuated by counter-terrorism officers and controlled explosives were used in a raid on a property in Cheetham Hill.

Bomb disposal experts from the Royal Logistics Corps entered a property on Boscombe Street, on the Moss Side/Rushlome border, near the site of Manchester City’s Maine Road stadium used to be. Residents from neighbouring properties were evacuated, with others told not to leave their homes for several hours.

An address on Boscombe Street was being searched by detectives throughout Saturday as they sought to close the net on the suspected terror cell behind Manchester Arena suicide bomber Salman Abedi.

Skiren Khan, 25, lives a few doors down and said she saw two men being put into a police van around 9am. Sunil Magnani, who runs a corner shop nearby, said two men were taken away by police from the terraced house. “One of my customers told me two guys were taken away, one Arab and one black guy,” said the shopkeeper.

Two men aged 20 and 22 were arrested in the early hours of Saturday morning at the Cheetham Hill address, police said. Neighbours identified Yahya and Mohamed Werfalli, aged 20 and 22, as two of the occupants of the raided house. They were said to be of Libyan descent and part of the same friendship groups as the Manchester bomber.

Police have not confirmed the identities of any of those arrested in connection with the investigation. Eleven people remain in custody.

On Saturday afternoon, Britain’s top counter-terrorism officer, assistant commissioner Mark Rowley, said officers had carried out 17 searches, mostly in the north-west. He told reporters: “We are getting a greater understanding of the preparation of the bomb. There is still much more to do. There will be more arrests. There will be more searches, but the greater clarity and progress has led JTAC, the independent body which assesses threat, to the judgment that an attack is no longer imminent.”

The threat level was raised on Tuesday over fears that the network linked to Abedi was at large, possibly with access to further explosives and intent on attacking again.

The decision to drop the threat level down one grade to severe means intelligence analysts are satisfied that risk is now under sufficient control.

On Friday, Rowley said: “We have already got a large part of the network, including some very significant arrests and some significant finds. Clearly, we haven’t covered all the territory we want to, but we have covered a large part of it, so our confidence has been increasing in recent days. But there’s still more to do to get the degree of confidence we want.”

By Saturday morning, analysts at the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, which sets the threat level, were satisfied the danger posed by the network linked to the Manchester bomber had lessened through arrests and also after examination of materials seized after a string on raids starting on Tuesday.

There is still concern among counter-terrorism officials about the network linked to Abedi, the Guardian understands, but JTAC believes this is insufficient to state that an attack may be imminent.

Although the threat level has been scaled back, Rowley said there would still be a heightened security presence at events over the bank holiday weekend. In a statement on Saturday afternoon, he said: “For practical reasons and precautionary reasons, we made the decision that the resources that we had planned for this weekends events will continue. They will still see that high level of policing presence – some armed, some unarmed.”

But he added that after the bank holiday the range of additional resources deployed in the wake of the Manchester attack would be stepped down. He added that military support would also be phased out in the coming days.

The threat level of severe means an attack is highly likely. The two months since 22 March, when five people including the attacker died in an attack on Westminster, have seen a particularly high level of activity by terrorists.



A total of seven plots are publicly known about: the attacks on Westminster and Manchester, and five more that were disrupted and arrests made; four in London, one in Birmingham.