Britain's Rather Large Problem

Mon, May 7, 2007 at 9:15:31 am PDT

Last week the BBC reported that Britain’s MI5 intelligence service was monitoring at least 2,000 terror suspects in the UK.

Today we learn that report was incorrect. The actual number of Islamic terrorists on MI5’s watch list is closer to 4,000.

Up to 4,000 terrorism suspects and their supporters are active in Britain, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Stevens said yesterday.Lord Stevens said the security service MI5 had recently suggested a figure of 2,000 but the true number was “probably nearer 4,000”.

Police and MI5 were “still too underfunded and undermanned to cope with the task they face in the decades to come. And that’s how long this will last,” he said.

The “infection” had spread out from “hot spots” such as Luton, the West Midlands and Finsbury Park in London and those involved in the fertiliser bomb plot case which finished this week were “ordinary and British”.

Lord Stevens also gave warning that al-Qa’eda-linked extremists were already trying to infiltrate the police and the security services and that dozens had already been weeded out.

He urged that known terrorism suspects and “hate clerics”, such as Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada, should be deported, adding: “Our human rights come first. Yet, incredibly, our so-called Human Rights laws, and our enviable history of religious tolerance, mean that foreigners preaching death and destruction to our way of life are allowed to stay here because their own countries won’t tolerate such evil.”