Metropolitan Police/PA Media
Ajem Choudhary was sentenced to life imprisonment and will serve a minimum of 28 years.
According to senior US and UK police officials who oversaw the prosecution of Aneem Choudhary, the threat of international and domestic terrorism poses an “unprecedented and far-reaching challenge”.
An Islamic preacher from East London is facing life in prison for leading a group banned under Britain’s terrorism laws and encouraging support for it online.
Officers say his case highlights the continuing danger posed by extremists and the violent groups they support.
But they also say counterterrorism forces are now battling a wide variety of threats, including a worrying number of people who don’t subscribe to any fundamental ideology but are simply drawn to violence.
They warned there were also concerns young people were being drawn to online extremism through conspiracy theories, the actions of “hostile nations” such as Russia and “our nation’s toxic political environment”.
Following Choudhary’s trial, the BBC conducted exclusive interviews with Matt Jukes, head of Britain’s counter-terrorism policing, and Rebecca Weiner, deputy commissioner for intelligence and counter-terrorism at the New York Police Department.
They said new security threats, along with extremist groups emboldened by events in the Middle East, were sparking multiple investigations.
“It’s definitely a different situation than it was before,” Deputy Commissioner Jukes said.
Weiner cited online extremism as perhaps the most significant aspect of what she called “an environment in which everything, everywhere is threatened all at once.”
Weiner said the two wars – the Israel-Gaza one and the Ukraine one – are being fought amid a “tsunami of disinformation” that makes it difficult to know what is true and what is not. “That’s playing out in the realm of violence.”
She said people were being “overwhelmed with false narratives” and led to believe conspiracy theories.
Jukes says the worrying aspect of this is that an increasing number of people are turning to terrorism not out of ideological fanaticism but out of an interest in violence.
He said that in 20 percent of the cases officers now handle, terrorism suspects have an undefined worldview: “People have literally gone from searching online for neo-Nazi material to searching for Islamist material.”
This is a real shift, he says, and people have moved from a single ideology to extremism and violence in the past.
Rebecca Weiner and Matt Jukes in exclusive interview with BBC
Mr Jukes said young people were viewing “dehumanising content”, including extreme pornography, and that online groups required them to “prove themselves by producing increasingly extreme content”.
This includes terrorist material created using artificial intelligence, and he said games were one of the “gateways” to online extremism.
The age demographic of people drawn into these extreme environments is getting younger, and he worries about “very young people who can carry out a lethal attack simply by picking up a knife or using a car as a weapon.”
Nearly one in five people arrested on terrorism suspicion in the UK in the past year were under 18.
Counterterrorism police on both sides of the Atlantic have also been busy since Hamas attacks on Israel last October left some 1,200 people dead and 251 taken hostage. More than 39,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The UK has opened 50 police investigations into supporting or encouraging terrorism, and has also seen a significant increase in anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate crimes.
Government statistics for the year to March 2024 show that terrorism-related arrests in the UK are up 23% year-on-year (although still lower than the period 2013-2020).
Jukes said that five years ago the fear of an IS attack in the UK would have kept him up at night, but now one of his main concerns was the growing threat from “determined and shameless” state actors.
For many years, “national hostility” made up only a small proportion of police and MI5 investigations, Jewkes said, but this proportion has more than quadrupled since the 2018 Salisbury poisonings, in which a nerve agent was used to assassinate a former Russian spy and his daughter.
A spy who defected to the West and his daughter were seriously injured, while a British woman died after coming into contact with Novichok. Russia has consistently denied any involvement.
Getty Images
Specialist officers wearing protective gear in Salisbury during the attempt to poison a former Russian spy in 2018
It also said there were growing threats from parts of China and that in the past two years it had thwarted at least 15 plots by Iran to kidnap or kill people it considered opponents of the regime in Britain.
“If these authoritarian state institutions feel that the UK and the US are fair, [game] “If they pursue adversity, then everything we stand for in terms of a safe and free democracy is challenged,” Jukes said.
The police chiefs also pointed to a “toxic” political environment that has led to politicians being targeted for violence, including two British members of parliament killed in terror attacks and President Donald Trump, who suffered an assassination attempt at a campaign rally on July 13.
In this frightening situation of diffuse danger, I ask, is there any news that can provide comfort?
Mr Jukes said “people can take some comfort” in the fact that police have thwarted nearly 40 “terror plots” since “that horrific year” of 2017, when attacks occurred in London and Manchester.
“And we do that really efficiently and effectively, month after month.”
Tara Thomas Agency stands at the forefront of the entertainment industry, with years of experience dedicated to nurturing the most exceptional talents and successful acts.
