How to catch a terrorist

Read time: 5 mins

In brief…

• The Crime Agents hosts reveal how the UK public are unaware of countless terror plots in the UK, focusing on 2017, which saw a spike in attacks on people in Britain.
• Neil Basu describes the personal impact of having terror incidents claim lives while he was working to prevent these incidents.
• They explain the dangers of online radicalisation, and why those recruited are mostly caught due to their own poor planning.

What’s the story?

Neil Basu and Andy Hughes, hosts of new podcast The Crime Agents, boast 50 years of experience between them.

Basu as a former assistant commissioner in the Metropolitan Police and in counter terrorism, and Hughes as a crime reporter and correspondent for some of the UK's biggest media outlets.

Both were working in crime and terrorism during 2017, dubbed by some as the "year of terror" in the UK, with the Westminster Bridge attack, the Manchester bombing, and Borough Market attacks claiming the lives of scores of people, along with incidents in Finsbury Park and Parsons Green.

Basu says that while the public are aware of attacks that were carried out, and covered in the media, many more plots were prevented in 2017, adding that the level of terror in the country at the time was “far greater” than anyone realised.

"We are a very effective professional machine that deals with an enormous volume – which in some respects, should scare the public," he tells Lewis Goodall.

"I've always said part of my responsibility was to reassure the public, not scare them. But you have to keep them alert."

He says there were 43 "late stage" terror plots in 2017 alone, meaning that each had reached a point where someone was about to stage an attack on someone else.

Even so, he still describes the March 2017 attack on London Bridge, which resulted in the deaths of four civilians and a police officer, as a “massive shock”. Basu was the senior national coordinator for Counter Terrorism operations at the time.

“36 innocent people died on my watch in that year. And I used to think about that every day,” he says.

“It’s eight years ago, and I've only just started in the last six months not to have regular flashbacks to that year.”

Investigating terror

Officers shot and killed the terrorist attacker outside Westminster, after he drove a car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge and stabbed a police officer to death.

The killer, Khalid Masood, born Adrian Russell Elms, was born in London and lived in various parts of the UK before becoming radicalised.

Basu says there is "no one route" to radicalisation, but says in almost all incidences there is an instance of "grievance", where the person has felt marginalised, and in 2017, growing anti-Muslim sentiment in the UK was being used as material by terror groups to recruit and brainwash these individuals.

Despite having had no involvement with Masood or his actions, the attack was claimed by the Islamic State, with Basu saying that ISIS would take credit for "anything that looked like a success" for its cause.

The Westminster attack took place in the same year as the Manchester bombing, in which 22 people were killed and more than 1,000 injured in a terror attack at an Ariana Grande concert.

Hughes was investigating terror activity in Manchester in the time, and was aware of the bomber, Salman Abedi, when the suicide bombing occurred.

"There was a group of eight of them, all from the same estate," Hughes says.

"They used to go to the same mosque. So 24 hours after the attack, we put the whole story out there.

"We had people from the security services calling us, asking how we had all this information so quickly – but we had it because we were investigating for six months."

He says the question of whether he should have been handing over information to the authorities already remains a "tough" one.

"It's something I try not to think about," he says.

""Usually journalists don't routinely let the authorities know what they're doing, and presume that they already had the same information.

"I was shocked that they didn't have it. So we handed over that information, and one person was arrested and later jailed for that because he was named there."

Basu says that most journalists would not have the confidence or trust in the authorities to hand over the findings of a press investigation.

"Doctors don't, teachers don't, social workers don't either," Basu says.

"A terrorist might not be in a national database, but they might be in a doctor's report or a social worker file.

"After 2017 we got much better at joining the dots, analysing the data, and we got much better at sharing the data outside of the security machine. So we get a fuller picture of what was happening. The collaboration is there."

How terrorists are recruited – and how they get caught

Basu explains that most terrorists are caught due to their own ineptitude.

"They're not very good at tradecraft, so they're not very good at disguising who they are, where they are and what they're doing," he says.

"They speak to the wrong people – sometimes our people."

Hughes says that today, most terror threats to the UK come from foreign states, with Basu describing some of those arrested in recent years as "embarrassing amateurs".

"But it's not like terrorism had gone away, and it was the biggest concern when I left the job," he says.

"We've brought the National Security Act in. We've lobbied for that. We needed more, stronger powers against state threat.

"You can pivot all the resources you successfully used to break al Qaeda, or ISIS, and the threats in this country, you can use all that on a hostile state, but we haven't broken that threat. You might have broken an organisation, but the ideas are still there and the people are still being radicalised online."

Basu describes social media as humankind's "greatest invention", but also its greatest curse.

He says it is the "greatest threat" to society, and highlights the disinformation shared after the 2024 Southport attack, which led to riots across the UK, as the prime example of this, amplified by bots online.

"They're capable of putting out propaganda at volume, which is incredibly impressive, disturbing, and it's radicalising people in days," he adds.

Listen to the latest episode of The Crime Agents.