London Bridge attack: Urgent review of UK terror threat level underway

A review of Britain’s terrorism threat level was underway on Friday night as Government analysts assessed whether they needed to upgrade it after the London Bridge knife attack.

The threat level was downgraded from “severe” to “substantial” just over three weeks ago after the Isil leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a raid, meaning a terror attack was judged to be “likely” rather than “highly likely.”

Critical to the decision by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC), an independent group of intelligence experts based in MI5, will be whether the attacker was acting alone or is part of a wider network.

They will also assess the impact of the attack on the hundreds of suspects that the police and security services have under surveillance because of the risk of copy-cat actions or willingness to accelerate nascent plots.

“If this is exciting and agitating their interest, that would mean raising the threat level,” said a counter-terror expert. “If it is a lone wolf and existing operations are not showing any increased volatility it won’t change.”

Once counter-terror officers have established the identity of the suspect, they are likely to know within hours if he might be part of a wider plot and officers start “knocking down doors,” said the expert.

There are five threat levels with the highest “critical”, which means an attack is “highly likely in the near future.” It was last raised to critical after the Manchester Arena bombing in May 2017 but brought back to “severe” in September of that year.

They are “fine” gradings based on both UK and international intelligence and threats. The decision to reduce the level to “substantial” was taken because of the damage to Isil’s ability to “drive new activity” and scaling back of domestic plots, according to counter-terror sources.

JTAC which is based in MI5 is independent with no political involvement and operates in a way similar to the Bank of England’s freedom to set interest rates - unlike the French system which is ultimately decided by politicians.

“After the UK went to critical after the Manchester arena attack, counter terror police were able to say they were on top of it so it could be brought down, whereas the French went to critical and politically got stuck there because of the risk to politicians’ reputations if they brought it down,” said a source.

The terrorism threat level is critical in determining the scale of “protect and prepare” operations by police and the security services which includes training and excercises to  specific threats, increased surveillance and patrols at potential targets.