MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — The Australian government on Monday elevated the nation’s terrorism threat alert level from “possible” to “probable,” citing concerns about increasing radicalization among young people and community tensions over the Israel-Hamas war.
It is the first time the threat level has been elevated to the midpoint of the five-tier National Terrorism Threat Advisory System since November 2022. The level had been “probable” the previous eight years.
But Prime Minister Anthony Albanese added that while government officials think the current climate makes terrorism an increased danger, they didn’t know of any specific threats.
“I want to reassure Australians probable does not mean inevitable, and it does not mean there is intelligence about an imminent threat or danger,” Albanese told reporters.
He said the government was acting on the advice of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, the nation’s main domestic spy agency known as ASIO.
“The advice that we’ve received is that more Australians are embracing a more diverse range of extreme ideologies and it is our responsibility to be vigilant,” Albanese said.
“We’ve seen a global rise in politically motivated violence and extremism. Many democracies are working to address this, including our friends in the United States and in the United Kingdom. There are many things driving this global trend towards violence. Governments around the world are concerned about youth radicalization, online radicalization and the rise of new mixed ideologies.”
Australian authorities last declared a terrorist act in April — a classification that that allows greater resourcing of a law enforcement response — when a 16-year-old boy was accused in the stabbing of a Sydney bishop while a church service was being livestreamed.
ASIO director-general Mike Burgess said more Australians are being radicalized more quickly.
“More Australians are embracing a more diverse range of extreme ideologies and more Australians are willing to use violence to advance their cause,” Burgess said,
“Politically motivated violence now joins espionage and foreign interference as our principal security concerns. These factors make ASIO’s job more difficult. The threats are becoming harder to predict and identify,” he added.
Burgess said the Australian public should be aware of the degraded security environment but not frightened.
“A threat level of ‘probable’ means we assess there is a greater than 50% chance of an onshore attack or planning in the next 12 months,” Burgess said. “It does not mean that we have intelligence about the current attack planning or expectation of an imminent attack.”
The threat level was reduced in 2022 after the Islamic State group's territorial losses in the Middle East led to fewer investigations of extremists plotting attacks in Australia, he said.
But political polarization, intolerance and anti-authority beliefs began to build with the COVID-19 pandemic and has accelerated since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 last year, further undermining social cohesion, he said. ASIO had successfully disrupted 24 planned extremist attacks in Australia since 2014.
There were eight attacks or planned attacks in the past four months investigated as potential terrorist acts. The suspects were age 14 to 21, underscoring a surge in youths embracing extremism, Burgess said.
“An escalation of the conflict in the Middle East, particularly in southern Lebanon, would inflict further strain, aggravating tensions and potentially fueling grievances,” Burgess said.
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon told reporters that his country’s National Terrorism Threat Level would remain at its “low” designation, the second-lowest possible on a five-tier scale.
“Each country makes its own assessment,” Luxon said when asked about the Australian move, adding that New Zealand’s level was last reviewed in February.
The country’s threat level was raised briefly to “high” in the aftermath of the 2019 attack by a lone gunman at two Christchurch mosques that killed 51 people. The level dropped from “medium” to “low” in November 2022 — the same month Australia lowered its designation.
Associated Press writer Charlotte Graham-McLay in Wellington, New Zealand, contributed to this report.
ADDS THE TOPIC OF TERRORISM THREAT ALERT LEVEL DISCUSSED IN THE NEWS CONFERENCE - Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, left, and Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) director-general Mike Burgess speak about the country's terrorism threat alert level during a news conference at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, Monday, Aug. 5, 2024. (Lukas Coch/AAP Image via AP)
LONDON (AP) — Britain is facing a “staggering rise” in attempts at assassination, sabotage and other crimes on U.K. soil by Russia and Iran, as the two states recruit criminals to “do their dirty work,” the head of Britain's domestic intelligence agency said Tuesday.
MI5 Director General Ken McCallum said his agents and police have tackled 20 “potentially lethal” plots backed by Iran since 2022 and warned that it could expand its targets in the United Kingdom if conflicts in the Middle East deepen.
So far, the threats have been aimed at Iranians abroad who oppose the country's authorities. But McCallum said there is the risk “of an increase in — or broadening of — Iranian state aggression in the U.K.” if the Middle East crisis escalates with Israel launching a major attack in response to Iran’s recent missile barrage.
In a rare public speech setting out the major threats to the U.K. from both states and militant groups, McCallum argued that hostile states, radicalized individuals and a revived Islamic State group have combined to create “the most complex and interconnected threat environment we’ve ever seen.”
McCallum said there also is a risk that Israel’s conflicts with Iran-backed groups — the militant Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as the Houthi rebels in Yemen — could trigger attacks in the U.K., though so far the crisis has not translated “at scale into terrorist violence” in Britain.
The number of state-threat investigations undertaken by MI5 has risen by 48% in the past year, with Iran, Russia and China the main perpetrators, McCallum told journalists at the U.K.’s counterterrorism command center in London.
McCallum said that since the death of Mahsa Amini, who died in Iranian police custody in September 2022 after being detained for allegedly violating the Islamic republic’s mandatory headscarf law, “we’ve seen plot after plot here in the U.K., at an unprecedented pace and scale.”
He said MI5 and the police have responded to 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots since January 2022, up by a third from the figure of 15 the government gave at the end of January.
McCallum said Russia’s military intelligence agency was trying to use “arson, sabotage and more” to create “mayhem” on the streets of Britain and other European countries.
Both Russia and Iran often turn to criminals, “from international drug traffickers to low-level crooks,” to carry out their illegal deeds, he said.
Several alleged state-backed plots have led to criminal charges. In December, a Chechen man was jailed for allegedly carrying out reconnaissance on the offices of a dissident Iranian broadcaster in London. Separately, several suspects are awaiting trial in London over an alleged Russia-linked plan to attack Ukrainian-owned businesses.
Britain is not alone in pointing a finger at Moscow and Tehran. Germany has arrested several people for allegedly spying or planning attacks on behalf of Russia. In May, Sweden’s domestic security agency accused Iran of using criminal networks to target Israeli or Jewish interests in the Scandinavian country.
Past speeches by McCallum and other U.K. intelligence chiefs have emphasized China's increasingly assertive behavior, which in 2022 McCallum called Britain’s greatest "strategic challenge.” On Tuesday, McCallum stressed the importance of the U.K.-China economic relationship but said there were “risks to be managed.”
The U.K.’s official terror threat level stands at “substantial,” the middle of a five-point scale, meaning an attack is likely, and McCallum said that since 2017, MI5 and the police have disrupted 43 late-stage plots, saving “numerous lives.”
While about three-quarters of the plots stem from Islamic extremist ideology and a quarter from the extreme right, he said those labels “don’t fully reflect the dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies we see,” drawn from a soup of “online hatred, conspiracy theories and disinformation." Young people are increasingly involved, he said, with 13% of the subjects of MI5 terror investigations under the age of 18.
He also said there were worrying signs that the Islamic State group is attempting a comeback, despite the collapse of its self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria several years ago.
McCallum said that “after a few years of being pinned well back, they’ve resumed efforts to export terrorism," and cited a March attack that killed more than 140 people at a Moscow concert hall and was claimed by IS, as “a brutal demonstration of its capability.”
MI5 has faced criticism for its failure to stop deadly attacks, including a 2017 suicide bombing that killed 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.
“The first 20 years of my career here were crammed full of terrorist threats,” McCallum said. “We now face those alongside state-backed assassination and sabotage plots, against the backdrop of a major European land war.”
MI5, he said, “has one hell of a job on its hands.”
Associated Press writer Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen contributed to this story.
Ken McCallum, Director General of MI5, delivers the annual Director General's speech at Counter Terrorism Operations Centre in west London, Tuesday Oct. 8, 2024. (Yui Mok/PA via AP)
Ken McCallum, Director General of MI5, delivers the annual Director General's speech at Counter Terrorism Operations Centre in west London, Tuesday Oct. 8, 2024. (Yui Mok/PA via AP)
Ken McCallum, Director General of MI5, delivers the annual Director General's speech at Counter Terrorism Operations Centre in west London, Tuesday Oct. 8, 2024. (Yui Mok/PA via AP)
