A Drone Threat Linked to Iran Emptied RAF Fairford
A credible threat linked to Iran, potentially involving a drone attack, is why the United States abruptly removed at least a dozen B-1 and B-52 bombers from RAF Fairford on Sunday, American officials say. A seventh man, a 22-year-old Briton, was arrested in Westminster on Tuesday. Police found petrol in three vans linked to the first five suspects, but no explosives. Six have been bailed and nobody has been charged.
This is the first reason anyone has put on the record, and it now rests on several American officials and a Defence Department statement rather than a single briefing. Andy Burnham says Britain sees “strong indications” that Iran played a part. The sequence began on 27 September, when police stopped five young men in white vans near the Gloucestershire base in the middle of the night. Other American aircraft that had used Fairford for strikes on Iran had already gone; the B-1s followed on Sunday and are back at home stations in the United States. The seventh man was held under section 5 of the Terrorism Act 2006, which covers preparing acts of terrorism, and a property was searched; one of the earlier arrests was a dual British-Iranian national. Vicki Evans, the senior national coordinator for counterterrorism policing, says detectives “continue to pursue multiple lines of enquiry”. Pentagon officials say the aircraft moved not because of a new threat but because of “the threat reporting that was already out there”, and the Ministry of Defence declined to comment, so the link between the arrests and the withdrawal is still not formally drawn. Tehran denies involvement, while maintaining that any base used to attack its territory is a legitimate target. What makes this a serious worry rather than a rumour is the precedent. NPR’s national security correspondent draws the comparison with Ukraine’s truck-launched drone raid on Russian bomber bases last year, which damaged or destroyed somewhere between twenty and forty aircraft without a single manned sortie, and which changed how every air force now thinks about parking expensive aeroplanes within reach of a public road. Watch whether any of the seven are charged, and whether the bombers come back.