Teenagers targeted by Russia and Iran for sabotage missions in Britain as state-backed threats increase five-fold

Proxy criminals - as young as in their mid-teens - are being recruited by Russia and Iran to carry out acts of sabotage, they said, and in some cases are being ‘ghosted’ without receiving payment.

Speaking to journalists at New Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, senior officers described the workload as having intensified in a way that they ‘never predicted it would’.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vicki Evans, Senior National Coordinator for Counter Terrorism Policing, said: “Foreign regimes are more willing than ever to undertake aggressive actions overseas.

“We’ve seen surveillance, traditional espionage in a bid to obtain secrets, physical attacks including attempts at assassination and sabotage. And this is very much a shift and long-term trend for us rather than a spike in activity.”

Last week Parliament’s intelligence security committee warned the UK is facing a rising and unpredictable threat from Iran, including targets on dissidents and Jewish and Israeli interests in the country.

Commander Dominic Murphy said Iran continued to pose a ‘very real physical threat to people in the UK’, as he pointed to the ongoing targeting of journalists in West London, working for the Persian news channel, Iran International.

“We continue to see a very high volume of Iranian threats into the United Kingdom,” he said.

“We know they are continuing to try and sow violence on the streets and they too, to some extent, are relying on criminal proxies to do that.

“We have seen very regular threats to individuals and continue to see the Iranian government speaking publicly about their feelings towards Iran International and journalists there.

“And we’re very alive to us recently disrupting further threats by Iran by individuals conducting surveillance on behalf of the Iranian government who have subsequently been arrested under the National Security Act.”

Mr Murphy added that while China continues to be among the three countries posing the biggest threat to the UK, it was ‘probably the smaller part of our workload in comparison to Russia and Iran’.

The senior officers revealed that online platforms are increasingly being used to entice would-be proxies into committing hostile acts on behalf of states, including young people who ‘want to gain notoriety’ among peers in their group chats.

Last week, Dylan Earl, aged 20, and Jake Reeves, 23, became the first people to be convicted under new National Security Act powers after they were recruited by the Russian mercenary group Wagner.

They were caught after an arson attack on a warehouse in London, linked to Ukraine.

Commander Dominic Murphy said Earl had been approached online and ‘had a fascination with Russia’ and had even suggested to Wagner that if he was ‘given sufficient amounts of money he could create a small army here to work on behalf of the Russian state’.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vicki Evans said legitimate private investigators and security staff with specialist skills are also being approached to work for hostile states, some unwittingly.

She said: “The reality is people are being targeted to conduct this work and they’re disposable to the individuals tasking them once they’ve been caught. The handlers and the taskers will not come to their rescue or support them in any way.

“There are multiple links in the chain, and it means there are degrees of separation between the people carrying out the acts - the proxies - and the people tasking them.

“You may or may not know where some of their taskings are coming from but think about that responsibility to be really vigilant and question who the clients are, who the chain is and the tasking chain of the activity because we know many of those in legitimate roles, this isn’t work they want to be engaged in.”

She revealed hundreds of police officers across the UK have been involved in national exercises, designed to test their response to state threats as she said: “While some of the activity might feel quite remote to individuals and communities, it impacts on all of society and our way of life together.”