British authorities have foiled 22 attacks since March 2017, three more than previously reported, Scotland Yard's most senior counterterrorism officer said on Monday.
Seven were related to "suspected right-wing terrorism," Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu told a conference on international terrorism in Herzliya, Israel, according to the text distributed by Scotland Yard.
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Basu said attacks were becoming easier to carry out and harder to detect. He promoted the merits of "Prevent," a British counterterrorism program involving several government agencies, including social services, which is designed to spot and deter people who might be vulnerable to recruitment or indoctrination by violent radicals.
"'Prevent' is designed to break the cycle of extremist violence by empowering communities and individuals – to make them resilient to radicalizers and able to spot the vulnerable that radicalizers target and manipulate," Basu said.
"A recent study showed that in the time before most lone-actor attacks, someone close to them knew about their growing ideology and violent intent. Mostly, they chose not to report it," Basu said.
In March 2017, in an attack that police said was motivated by Islamist extremism, a man drove a car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge in London and then fatally stabbed a police officer. Later that year, there were three other attacks that police described as terrorism, including one on Muslim worshippers near a London mosque.
Potential threats that most concern British officers include returning foreign fighters, lone actors, mentally ill people and a "rising threat" of right-wing terrorism.
Referring to the attacks on mosques in New Zealand by an Australian far-right extremist last March, Basu said that while right-wing terrorism was once largely a local threat, it has now become a "global phenomenon as adept at using social media as Daesh," a term used by some for the Islamic State group.
"Christchurch [New Zealand] is the most recent example," Basu said. "Seven of the 22 attacks we have stopped since March 2017 relate to suspected RWT [right-wing terrorism]," Basu said.
He said he could tell stories of 400 people in England and Wales who, "in the same year we were most attacked," got support from the Prevent program that "changed their story."
He added that research by Spanish experts using MRI technology found that people with extremist views were "more likely to be moved to violence when they felt excluded." The lesson was that "effective social integration could help stop extremist violence," Basu said.
