Theresa May unveils new anti-terror measures: Speech

Theresa May unveils new anti-terror measures: Speech; ENGLAND: London: Royal United Services Institute: INT Theresa May MP (Home Secretary) to podium Theresa May MP (Home Secretary) speech SOT - Since I became Home Secretary four and a half years ago, I have been briefed about many hundreds of terror suspects intent on attacking Britain, the British people and our interests overseas. The Security Service believes that since the attacks on 7th July 2005, around forty terrorist plots have been disrupted. There have been attempts to conduct marauding ‘Mumbai-style’ gun attacks on our streets, blow up the London Stock Exchange, bring down airliners, assassinate a British ambassador and murder serving members of our armed forces. Almost all of these attacks have been prevented by the first-class men and women of our security and intelligence services, the police, and our allies overseas. But as the IRA once boasted, the terrorists “only have to be lucky once.” And last year, Drummer Lee Rigby was murdered in broad daylight by Islamist extremists in London, while Mohammed Saleem, an 82-year old British Muslim from Birmingham, was murdered by a Ukrainian far right extremist who then tried to bomb mosques in Walsall, Wolverhampton and Tipton. The terrorists who committed these cowardly acts are now where they belong, behind bars serving life sentences. But since the attacks they carried out, the threat we face from terrorism has grown more serious. This summer, JTAC - the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre - raised the threat level for international terrorism from ‘substantial’ to ‘severe’. This means that JTAC believes an attack on the United Kingdom is highly likely. The decision to change the threat level was based primarily on developments in Syria and Iraq, where the terrorist group ISIL controls swathes of territory. We believe more than 500 British nationals have travelled to Syria and Iraq, many of them to fight. And they have been joined by ...