UK had raised security at Fairford base before terror incident

Alex Wickham, Bloomberg News on Sep 28, 2026

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The U.K. was closely monitoring increased threats to a British airbase used in U.S. strikes against Iran before an attempted attack was foiled on Sunday, people familiar with the matter said, adding that authorities had tightened security at the site.

Five men were arrested on Sunday on suspicion of preparing a terrorist act at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire in an incident that investigators are considering a serious attempted attack. All five suspects were U.K. nationals, Counter Terrorism Policing said in a statement on Monday, adding that investigators were pursuing several new lines of inquiry in the case.

The plot appears to have been thwarted at a late stage after a local resident saw a group of men behaving suspiciously near the base in the early hours of Sunday morning and called police, who responded and arrested the men. Photographs from the scene showed five shirtless men sitting on the ground handcuffed with three white vans parked nearby.

The five men arrested were aged between 23 and 25 and resided in the London areas of Camden, Westminster and Willesden, the police said.

The base is used by the to launch strikes against Iran and investigators consider that role to be the most likely motivation for the attack, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to named discussing an ongoing investigations. Still, authorities including U.K. Defense Secretary Wes Streeting cautioned that it was too early to determine a motive.

The Iranian Embassy in London said it “categorically rejects and strongly condemns” what it dismissed as “unfounded and malicious” attempts to link the case to Iran. Such speculation would “serve no purpose other than to fuel Iranophobia propaganda in the U.K.,” the embassy said in a statement posted on the social media platform X.

U.S. President Donald Trump said Sunday that the suspects were “looking to do big damage,” praising the U.K. for stopping the attack. “We had them under view for a long time,” he said.

However, a local farmer told British media that she had seen a group of men wearing balaclavas near the base just after midnight on Sunday and called the police, raising questions about whether the plot was on the radar of the security services.

The reality may be somewhere in between. While British authorities were watching for threats to the base, according to the people familiar with the matter, they still credited the member of the public with alerting police to the suspects’ presence near the sensitive facility on Sunday morning.

“I don’t want to draw a link between what’s happening in Iran and this incident at this stage,” Streeting told Bloomberg TV on the sidelines of the governing Labour Party’s annual conference in Liverpool. “It’s far too early for me to, or indeed anyone else, to speculate on aims and motives.”

“There is no doubt that the Iranian regime poses a threat to this country, our interests and our allies,” Streeting told Bloomberg. “We will stand together with our friends and allies to deter and repel any attempts by Iranian or Iranian-backed agents who would do us harm.”

Prime Minister Andy Burnham described the incident as “deeply concerning.”

RAF Fairford serves as the preferred bomber forward operating location in Europe for the U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command. U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham in July approved the use of the base by the U.S. for “defensive strikes” against Iran, continuing the policy of his predecessor, Keir Starmer.

The U.K. is currently contending with a range of security threats, leaving police with no shortage of possible motivations to investigate. The government has publicly linked a number of anti-Semitic incidents in recent months to Iranian-backed groups, while the country is also combating rising threats from more traditional Islamist-inspired actors. Separately, left-wing activists opposed to Israel’s war in Gaza have broken into British bases several times in recent years.

Britain, like the rest of Europe, is also dealing with an increase in incidences of Russian so-called “hybrid” warfare such as attacks on warehouses containing goods bound for Ukraine.

In July, the U.K. government said it was investigating what it said was a proxy group backed by Iran, Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia, over a series of arson attacks on Jewish locations in London. In 2015, Ken McCallum, director of the U.K.’s domestic security service MI5, said his teams had tracked “more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots” in the previous year.

“I am very aware of the levels of speculation about the motivation behind this incident, and the geopolitical questions that are being raised,” Vicki Evans, Counter Terrorism Policing’s senior national coordinator, said on Monday. Evans asked for the “space to work carefully and clearly” on the investigation.

—With assistance from Caroline Hepker.