Iran threat to UK is significant and rising, lawmakers say

By Michael Holden

LONDON (Reuters) -Iran poses a significant and wide-ranging threat to Britain and, while not in the same league as Russia or China, it is one which is rising and for which the UK government is not fully prepared, British lawmakers said in a report released on Thursday.

Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) said the Iranian risk varied from physical attacks on and potential assassinations of dissidents and Jewish targets, to espionage, offensive cyber capabilities and its attempt to develop nuclear weapons.

"Iran is there across the full spectrum of all the kinds of threats we have to be concerned with," the committee chair, Kevan Jones, said in a statement.

Although the evidence given to the committee concluded in August 2023, the lawmakers said their recommendations about action the government should take remained relevant and it is the latest message from the British authorities about the danger they say Tehran poses.

Last year, the head of Britain's domestic spy agency MI5 said since January 2022, his service and British police had responded to 20 Iran-backed plots to kidnap or kill British nationals or individuals based in the United Kingdom regarded by Tehran as a threat.

In March, Britain said it would require the Iranian state to register everything it does to exert political influence in the UK, subjecting Tehran to an elevated tier of scrutiny in light of what it said was increasingly aggressive activity.

British security services say Tehran uses criminal proxies to carry out its work in Britain, and the ISC said the threat to individuals was comparable to that posed by Russia.

In December, two Romanians were charged after a journalist working for a Persian language media organisation in London was stabbed in the leg, while just last month three Iranian men appeared in court charged with assisting Iran's foreign intelligence service and plotting violence against journalists.

The ISC said the British government should fully examine whether it would be practicable to proscribe the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), an action for which some lawmakers have long called.

(Reporting by Michael Holden; editing by William James)