Police Foil 'Imminent' Plot Against Manchester's Jewish Community; Two Held
Counter-terrorism police say a long-running investigation has disrupted a plot to attack Jewish people in the Manchester area: two men in their thirties were arrested in Newton Street on Sunday afternoon under the Terrorism Act, hours before Yom Kippur and a year after the Heaton Park synagogue attack that killed two. Searches in Liverpool and Salford are complete; warrants allow detention until Sunday. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vicki Evans: “we do not believe there to be any ongoing threat to the public”.
The timing is the story: arrests on the eve of the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, twelve months after the attack that made Heaton Park a name every British Jew knows, in the city the Prime Minister ran as mayor. That the suspects were taken to London for questioning and that police describe the plot they believe they disrupted as imminent mark this as a Counter Terrorism Policing operation of the first order, not a local arrest. The threat level remains severe. What is not yet known — motive, ideology, whether the men acted alone or were directed — will shape the politics: a directed plot points to the hostile-state machinery the Prime Minister described at the UN hours later; a self-radicalised one points to the online ecosystems the Online Safety Act was meant to police. Watch the charging decision, due by Sunday.