Iran has targeted prominent Jewish individuals across at least 15 attempts to kill or abduct people in the UK, the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) has warned.
Iran poses a significant and wide-ranging threat to Britain, and while not in the same league as Russia or China, it is one that is rising and for which the UK government is not fully prepared, British lawmakers said in a report released on Thursday.
The ISC said the Iranian threat varied from physical attacks on and potential assassinations of dissidents and Jewish targets, to espionage, offensive cyber capabilities, and its attempt to develop nuclear weapons.
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“Since the beginning of 2022, there has been a significant increase in the physical threat posed by Iran to those residing in the UK. It has significantly increased both in terms of pace and the number of threats. The threat is focused acutely on dissidents and other opponents of the regime.
There is also an increased threat against Jewish and Israeli interests in the UK,” the 230-page report reads. “There have been at least 15 attempts at murder or kidnap against British nationals or UK-based individuals since the beginning of 2022.”
MI5 released a statement, according to the Telegraph, “It is not typically Iranian nationals that are conducting the operations themselves … They use criminal groups that you wouldn’t at all expect.”
“Iran is there across the full spectrum of all the kinds of threats we have to be concerned with,” the committee chair, Kevan Jones, said in a statement.
“We remain concerned that the government’s policy on Iran has been focused on crisis management and has been primarily driven by concerns over Iran’s nuclear program, to the exclusion of other issues.”
Iran’s embassy in London did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Legislation to combat the Iran threat
The committee said the British government should fully examine whether it would be practicable to proscribe Iran’s hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, an action that some lawmakers have long called for.
Although the evidence given to the committee concluded in August 2023, the lawmakers said their recommendations about the action the government should take remained relevant.
Last year, the head of Britain’s domestic spy agency, MI5, said that, since January 2022, his service and British police had responded to 20 Iran-backed plots to kidnap or kill British nationals or individuals based in Britain who were regarded by Tehran as a threat.
Iran reacted to that speech by rejecting what it said were repetitive accusations by British security officials.
In March, Britain said it would require the Iranian state to register everything it does to exert political influence in the UK, subjecting Tehran to an elevated tier of scrutiny in light of what it said was increasingly aggressive activity.
British security services say Tehran uses criminal proxies to carry out its work in Britain.
In December, two Romanians were charged after a journalist working for a Persian language media organization in London was stabbed in the leg, while just last month, three Iranian men appeared in court charged with assisting Iran’s foreign intelligence service and plotting violence against journalists.