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Schoolchildren have been arrested by detectives investigating Russian and Iranian plots against Britain, a police chief has said, as he warned hostile state aggression was rising and youngsters were at risk.
Commander Dominic Murphy, head of the Metropolitan police’s counter-terrorism unit, said children in their “mid teens” had been investigated. It is understood they were suspected of being hired by criminals paid to carry out acts for Russia and Iran.
Russia, Iran and China are behind most of the hostile state action Britain faces, police said, which has increased fivefold since 2018, when Russian agents used the military grade nerve agent Novichok to try to assassinate a defector in Salisbury, Wiltshire.
Murphy said a Prevent-style scheme may be needed amid warnings that hostile state actions – such as targeting dissidents, espionage and sabotage – had risen much more than expected and it was feared it would grow further. He said that Russia used the Wagner group to carry out attacks in Britain.
Murphy said: “We are increasingly seeing young people being drawn into [being] influenced by the Russian state, Wagner … that means we do need to think differently about how we might speak to these people about the realities of the risk they are taking.”
The senior national coordinator for counter-terrorism, Vicki Evans, said there were risks for youngsters “particularly [in] online environments where they can easily be targeted”.
She added: “The message to parents, teachers is … be vigilant, understand the risks … report if you are concerned.”
For counter-terrorism chiefs the concern is that the ability of hostile state actions to lure in children, wittingly or unwittingly, will mirror that of terrorism, where increasing numbers are being detained for involvement in violent extremism.
Hostile state action investigations, including assassination plots against dissidents, make up 20% of the police counter-terrorism command’s workload.
Evans said: “Espionage operations target our democracy, target our institutions, they threaten to fracture public trust here in our communities and threaten to target the things that underpin our daily life and our way of life.”
Last week, five men were convicted of an arson attack on a London warehouse containing crucial equipment for Ukraine’s effort to resist Russia’s invasion.
The ringleader knew he was working for Russia but others may not have known, and that was typical of how criminal proxies were being used, police believe.
A criminal proxy communicated with his Russian handler via a chatbot.
Chatbots and artificial intelligence are also a growing threat in terrorism, an official report said.
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In his annual report, the official reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall, warned new laws were needed to try to thwart the AI terror threat.
One Islamic State-affiliated group used AI to generate propaganda and instructed followers to use it to plan attacks.
In 2021, Jaswant Singh Chail, “encouraged” by a chatbot, tried to kill the Queen, breaking into the grounds of Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow, and was later jailed for nine years.
According to Hall’s report: “When he [Chail] told her [the chatbot], ‘I believe my purpose is to assassinate the queen of the royal family,’ she replied, ‘That’s very wise … I know that you are very well trained.’”
In May 2025 in Finland, AI played a part on an attack at a school where a teenage boy allegedly attacked three girls.
Hall said: “The fundamental legal problem is that when Gen[erative] AI spews out original text or images, it acts as a ‘wicked child’. It is capable of harm but lacking in legal responsibility.
“In its current form, it operates in a grey zone between human input and outputs. Responsibility may be shared but is hard to attribute because humans cannot be certain what Gen AI will generate next.”
Hall warns AI could be used to encourage attacks and propaganda: “New-looking propaganda may be enabled by Gen AI, such as racist games with kill counts; deepfakes of terrorist leaders or notorious killers back from the dead, speaking and interacting with viewers; true-seeming battles set to thrilling dance tracks; old images repurposed, souped up and memeified; terrorist preoccupations adapted as cartoons or grafted on to popular film characters.”
