Counter-terrorism police are seeing a rapid increase in the number of suspects fascinated with extreme violence, whose search histories are like “a pick and mix of horror”, a senior officer has said.
Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vicki Evans, who is senior national co-ordinator for counter-terrorism policing, said the youngest people in their caseload are children of 10 or 11.
She told journalists: “Becoming far more common and more prevalent is this rapidly increasing fascination with extreme violence and extreme content that we’re seeing throughout our case work.
“The type of material that we’re encountering, and my officers and staff are encountering in casework, is absolutely staggering and horrific.
“Sometimes it’s not, but what it absolutely is is a pick and mix of horror, horrific content.”
She added: “These sort of grotesque fascinations with violence and harmful views that we’re seeing are increasingly common.”
Investigators see a lot of young people accessing extreme material, which is “hugely worrying”, she said.
Currently, around a fifth of suspects arrested over alleged terrorist offences are children under 18, and about 40 per cent of referrals under the anti-extremism programme, Prevent, are for children aged 11 to 15.
“We most definitely need to think differently about how we stop that conveyor belt of young people who are seeing and being exposed to this type of material, and unfortunately, sometimes then going on to commit horrific acts.”
Police and security services have stopped 43 late-stage terror plots since 2017, three in the last 12 months.
Some were “goal line saves”, Ms Evans said.
The most recent three attacks were two Islamist plots and one extreme right-wing, that were aimed at causing mass casualties.
At a briefing for journalists at Scotland Yard, Ms Evans described the terror threat as “smouldering”.
She said: “I use the word smouldering really, because we have some really deep, dark hot spots, some pockets where we cannot leave the activity and the groups unattended, and we need to continue to maintain our focus on them to keep the threat at bay.”
The group that has taken control of the country, HTS, remains banned as a terrorist organisation in the UK and expressing support for it is a crime.
Ms Evans said: “In light of events in Syria, I can absolutely confirm that we’re proactively reviewing our casework, proactively identifying whether there are any new risks in our system that have been inspired or committed by the events, and we’ll continue to do that.”
The caseload faced by counter-terrorism police linked to hostile state activity has risen by four or five times in the last few years, Ms Evans told reporters, so these investigations plus inquiries into war crimes make up about a fifth of their workload.
The head of MI5 Ken McCallum warned in October that Russia was intent on causing mayhem in the UK, while authorities had stopped 20 state-backed plots hatched by Iran in the UK since 2022.
Ms Evans said: “These state threats manifest themselves in increasingly aggressive and shameless tactics.
“They’re aimed at individuals. They’re aimed at our communities, businesses and sometimes even our democratic institutions, and we won’t tolerate this.”
She appealed to the public to be vigilant and to businesses to think about whether they are vulnerable to hostile state activity.
