More lone wolf terror attacks 'very likely' warns Europol crime agency

25.06.2018

A man stands next to floral tributes for the victims of the May 2017 lone wolf terror attack at the Manchester Evening News Arena. Credit: Emilio Morenatti /AP

More lone wolf terror attacks such as those carried out in Manchester and most recently in the Belgian city of Liege are “very likely” to hit the European Union, Europol warned as it revealed the number of jihadist attacks in the EU had more than doubled in 2017.

Terrorism “ordered, guided or inspired” by Isil, al-Qaeda or other jihadist organisations “remain a real possibility”, the EU’s crime agency, which is based in The Hague, said on Wednesday.  

“This is the strongest testament to the necessity of working together to defeat terrorism,” Europol said a day after GCHQ boss Jeremy Fleming called for the UK and EU to continue cooperating on security after Brexit.

He said, “We've played a critical role in the disruption of terrorist operations in at least four European countries.”

Britain will lose its membership of Europol after Brexit but the British government has called for a close relationship to be preserved.  On Tuesday, Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, insisted the UK would lose its access to the bloc’s intelligence-sharing databases and told Britain to get real over the consequences of leaving the bloc.

Europol said online propaganda and social media were “still essential” to groups looking to fundraise and recruit homegrown terrorists living in the EU. The risk remained potent despite the decline in Isil’s power in Iraq and Syria.

In a report, Europol said that there were 205 foiled, failed and completed terror attacks in the EU last year, a 45 per cent increase from 2016. Jihadist attacks, which have become less sophisticated, grew from 13 in 2016 to 33 in 2017, the report said

The attacks killed 68 victims, 62 of which were in Jihadist outrages,  and left 844 injured across the EU.

It said 975 individuals were arrested in the EU for terrorism-related offences last year and at least 11 Isil-inspired terror attacks were foiled.

Most of the 2017’s terror attacks (137) were “ethno-nationalist and separatist” with more than half (88) in Northern Ireland, the Europol report said.

Left-wing and anarchist terrorist attacks in the EU dropped slightly to 24 in 2017, while five attempted or successful attacks were linked to right-wing extremists.

A source in Germany's BfV domestic intelligence service said on Wednesday that Islamists could stage an attack in Germany at any time with the lethal toxin ricin.

German security officials also said there was an 88 percent spike in left-wing violence in Germany because of the G-20 summit in Hamburg and the rise of the far-right party Alternative for Germany.

Source: Telegraph