Military joined raids on Iran terror suspects to foil ‘late stage plot’

A raid by heavily armed officers as part of a major counter-terrorism investigation indicated a plot to carry out an attack may have been in its late stages, a former counter-terror chief has said.

Seven Iranian nationals were among eight men arrested in two separate operations on Saturday.

The military supported the raids, with dramatic footage showing masked men armed with rifles swooping on a suspect in Rochdale.

The 40-year-old was one of five suspects detained with other arrests in Swindon, London, Manchester and Stockport over an alleged plot to target a “specific premises”.

Nick Aldworth, who led the operational protective security responses to the London 2017 terrorist attacks, said the operation suggested investigators feared suspects were armed.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper described it as one of the biggest counter-state and counter-terrorism operations in recent years.

In a separate investigation, a three-man suspected Iranian terror cell was arrested in London under the counter-espionage National Security Act.

Aldworth said special forces joining a counter-terror raid was “very rare”, adding that deploying heavily armed officers indicated “potentially a very late stage plot”.

“What I think that says to me…is the leaders of that investigation have reason to believe that the people to be arrested were in possession of threat items – whether it’s firearms or explosives, I’ve no idea,” he told The i Paper.

“That suggests to me that this was potentially quite a late stage plot, so a plot that’s quite close to maturity.

“What will typically happen with these investigations is they’ll run as far as they can to secure the best evidence, but at some point, there’s a tipping point where it no longer becomes safe not to have those people under our direct control [… arrested].

“The deployment of firearms is permitted where it’s believed that you know the person you’re going to arrest, it may well be the only way that you can control them is through lethal force.”

Members of the unit which arrested the suspect in Rochdale were believed to be armed with C8 suppressed rifles, a weapon used by the SAS and Special Boat Service.

Counter Terrorist Specialist Firearms Officers also stormed the property on a terraced street before a shirtless man was led out.

It is believed using special forces to help arrest suspects could indicate authorities feared they had had military training and military-grade weapons.

In the 2017 London Bridge terror attack, an SAS Blue Thunder helicopter landed on London Bridge with special forces hunting for one of the attackers carrying out a controlled explosion at Southwark Cathedral.

Aldworth said: “There’s a team from Special Forces available, 24/7 often forward deployed in London.

“We used to train the special forces. Sometimes we’d have special forces medics attached to our teams, really for their experience more than anything.

“But there was a degree of collaboration between the two entities, and there was a regular programme of exercising and testing so that when those two very, very different entities came to work together, it happened successfully.”

Dominic Murphy, the head of counter terrorism at the Met Police, said the force made all the arrests they sought to on Saturday, but several hundred officers are still working on the investigations, which are in their early stages.

The first four Iranians were arrested on suspicion of preparation of a terrorist act, contrary to section 5 of the Terrorism Act 2006. A fifth man, whose nationality is yet to be established, was detained under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.

Those arrested include a 29-year-old man in the Swindon area, a 46-year-old man in west London, a 29-year-old man in the Stockport area, a 40-year-old man in Rochdale and a fifth man in the Manchester area. They remain in custody.

Another three Iranian men were arrested at three addresses in London as part of a separate counter-terrorism operation under section 27 of the National Security Act 2023.

Two men and a 14-year-old boy were also mistakenly apprehended after they “appeared to have run away” from the scene of the arrests in Stockport, the Metropolitan Police said. They were detained before being released.

The teenager told Manchester Evening News he ran away because he feared he would be kidnapped after officers with “guns and balaclavas” jumped out of an unmarked car that pulled up in front of him.

Section 27 allows police to make arrests without a warrant if they reasonably suspect them of being involved in “foreign power threat activity”.

The head of MI5, Ken McCallum, said in October that authorities had stopped 20 state-backed plots hatched by Iran in the UK since 2022.

MPs have called for the Government to proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Aldworth said the 2018 nerve agent attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Salisburyb by Kremlin agents had alerted UK counter-terror police to the threat posed by hostile states on British shores.

“It was obvious through that work that the threats didn’t just originate from Russia. They originated from Iran. They originated from North Korea. They originated from several states,” he said.

“So it’s not beyond the realms of probability that these attacks in the UK would be orchestrated by the Iranian government.”