Terror in Manchester: 3,500 potential terrorists & 400 ISIS fighters back from Syria in UK
THE number of potential terrorists being watched in the UK at the time of the Manchester bombing has swelled to nearly 3,500 – but our security services are using powers to monitor them LESS than they did a year ago, Express.co.uk can reveal.
By JON AUSTIN
Express.co.uk
Tue, May 23, 2017
Latest figures show the 3,000 potential terrorists monitored since 2015 has grown after the return of UK-born people who left to fight with ISIS.
About 400 ISIS-trained fighters are believed to have returned from war zones in Syria and Iraq.
Despite being on red alert for more attacks on home soil like last night’s Manchester bombing, new statistics show the number of arrests, stop and searches, and examinations of suspected terrorists at ports and airports dropped in 2016 on the levels seen in 2015.
This comes at the same time the number of people arrested on suspicion of plotting terror strikes on British soil has grown by eight per cent.
In 2016 there were 260 terror-related arrests, a drop of eight per cent on the 282 people held in 2015.
The figures were revealed in a quarterly Home Office report on the use of police powers under the Terrorism Act 2000, which was released in March.
The figures also show that the amount of white people being arrested on suspicion of terrorism has gone up.
Seventy (25 per cent) of the people arrested in 2015 were white, while 91 (35 per cent) of those held last year were white.
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