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A top Met officer has warned of children as young as 10 accessing extreme material online amid a rapid increase in “grotesque fascination” with violence.
Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vicki Evans, who is senior national co-ordingator for counter-terrorism policing, said there had been a rise in suspects having a “pick and mix of horror” within their internet search histories.
And she said those encountered by her teams were as young as 10 or 11 years old, and that investigators were seeing an increasing amount of young people accessing extreme material.
It was also revealed that since 2017, police and security services have foiled 43 “late-stage” planned terror attacks since 2017, including three in the past 12 months.
Some of those were “goal line saves”, said Ms Evans, with the most recent three planned attacks being two Islamist plots and one extreme right-wing aimed at causing mass casualties.
Speaking at a press briefing at New Scotland Yard, Ms Evans 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.”
Refering to the influence of young people becoming engrossed with violence, she said that the material encountered by counter-terrorism policing was “absolutely staggering and horrific”.
“So we are seeing [internet] search histories which contain violence, misogyny, gore, extreme pornography, racism, fascination with mass violence, school massacres, incel, and sometimes that’s coupled with terrorist material,” she said.
She added that there was a rising threat of “self-initiated terrorists” who have no connection to a wider network, but become inspired by material they encounter online and go on to plan attacks in “quite low sophisticated ways”.
Counter-terrorism police are reviewing their caseloads after events in Syria, Ms Evans added.
The rebel group that overthrew Bashar al-Assad, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, remained a banned terrorist organisation in the UK.
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 had risen by four or five times in the last few years, Ms Evans told reporters, with the investigations, plus inquiries into war crimes, making up about a fifth of their workload.
The head of MI5 Ken McCallum warned in October that Russia was intent on causing “sustained 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.
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