cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/38645950

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Russia, Iran and China are behind a growing number of life-threatening operations in Britain including attacks and kidnappings, often deploying criminals and sometimes children as proxies, two senior British police officers said on Tuesday.

The British authorities in recent years have repeatedly voiced concern at what they said was malign activity by the three states in Britain, ranging from traditional espionage and actions to undermine the state, to sabotage and assassinations.

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British officers said there had been a fivefold increase in hostile state activity since the Novichok nerve agent poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2017, which London says was carried out by Russian spies.

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Dominic Murphy, who heads up London’s Counter Terrorism Command, said the breadth, complexity and volume of hostile operations from Russia, Iran and China had grown at a rate neither they nor their international partners nor any intelligence community had predicted.

“We are increasingly seeing these three states … undertaking threat-to-life operations in the United Kingdom,” he told reporters.

In most instances, proxies, usually criminals acting quite often for small amounts of cash, were carrying out the states’ work for them, said Vicki Evans, the Senior National Coordinator for UK Counter Terrorism Policing.

The proxies also included vulnerable people or those who felt disenfranchised, with those aged in their mid teens among those arrested or under investigation.

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