Children and young adults in London are being recruited by hostile states such as Russia and Iran to carry out sabotage and other crimes, the Metropolitan Police has said.
Cdr Dominic Murphy, the Met’s head of counter-terrorism, said there had been a five-fold rise in hostile state activity since the Salisbury poisonings in 2018.
He told the ‘s Politics London programme that some recruits were teenagers and that parents should monitor what their children were doing online.
A Home Office spokesperson said the convictions over an east London warehouse arson, which targeted aid bound for Ukraine, “should serve as a clear warning” to anyone considering working for a foreign power such as Russia.
The blaze, in March 2023, was linked to the Wagner Group, an organisation associated with the Russian state. The warehouse in Leyton had shipped equipment including Starlink satellite kits used by Ukrainian troops.
“Unfortunately it is an investigation that we’re seeing more of within our casework,” Cdr Murphy said.
“This was a group of individuals recruited by the Wagner Group, ultimately an organisation associated to the Russian state, to conduct activity on their behalf in the United Kingdom.”
He said the same network had also carried out reconnaissance for a planned attack on a Russian dissident and businesses he owned in London.
Cdr Murphy warned that foreign powers were increasingly turning to young people in Britain as proxies.
“I’m really concerned about what we’re seeing in some of our casework,” he said.
“We are seeing younger people drawn into conducting this activity on behalf of foreign states.
“And there can be a variety of reasons for that, but we want to draw the public’s attention and parents’ and families’ attention… that this is a real risk now.”
Cdr Murphy urged parents to pay attention to what their children are doing online.
The commander said motivations included money, notoriety and “trying to feel like they belong to something slightly bigger”, with some already on the fringes of criminality.
Nationally, more than 20% of counter-terrorism policing’s workload now relates to state threats, Cdr Murphy said.
While self-initiated terrorism remained the Met’s primary concern, Cdr Murphy said foreign states such as Russia and Iran were increasingly exploiting young people to evade stronger security measures.
Calvin Bailey, the Labour MP for Leyton and a member of the Defence Committee, said: “What this tells us is that it’s actually happening on our shores right now… people that are all under financial pressure, that are easily swayed by relatively small amounts of money, will find themselves working for foreign actors and not realising the consequences.”
Chris Philp, the Conservative shadow home secretary, called the trend “deeply, deeply concerning”.
“I hope when convictions are secured, it will be considered an aggravating factor that they were working for a hostile state and they’ll get higher sentences,” he added.
The Home Office said: “National security is the foundation of our Plan for Change and we will continue to support our world class law enforcement agencies in disrupting state threats.”
