MI5 chief reveals TWELVE terror plots to attack Britain have been foiled since June 2013

POLICE and intelligence services have foiled TWELVE plots to attack Britain since June 2013, MI5 said today.

Andrew Parker, director general of the MI5 domestic intelligence agency said ISIS posed the biggest current threat to national security.

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He said: "Today the most visible threat is from terrorism and in particular that posed by Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant - ISIL - or Daesh in Syria.

"Together with MI6 (the foreign intelligence service), GCHQ (the security agency), and the police, MI5 has disrupted 12 plots in the UK since June 2013."

It comes on the day  senior police officers warned gangs are smuggling assault weapons like the ones used in the Paris massacres into Britain.

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National Crime Agency and Met Police bosses say they have seen a rise in deactivated guns being reactivated in Eastern Europe and coming into Britain by sea, air and even by post.

Some illegal weapons are also bought on the Dark Web or from licensed owners that have either sold or had their weapons stolen.

Firearms are also being supplied by corrupt armed forces personnel.

Marine reservist Martin Shannon pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to attempting to supply an assault rifle, other firearms and explosives including grenades to an undercover cop.

There has also been a rise in gang violence in British cities as criminals compete over turf and some members have even joined terrorist cells after radicalisation on the streets or in jail.

Met Assistant Commissioner for specialist operations including terrorism, Mark Rowley, said: “There are those who fully subscribe and are determined to act for Daesh, others are just angry and are criminals and are given a way to express that through the streets or in prison.

“It’s a complex picture, it is more at a low level, there is not incentive for the highest criminal to get involved in this.

“This rise in gun activity isn’t country wide, the biggest rise is seen by our metropolitan forces. It suggests escalation of the use of weapons between gangs to compete with each other.”

In June this year five men caught smuggling the UK’s largest haul of automatic weapons were jailed for a total of more than 90 years.

The guns, 22 Czech VZ-58 assault rifles and nine Skorpion machine pistols, were transported from the continent by boat into Britain by the gang led by Harry Shilling.

They trafficked the weapons through the same route used by Al-Qaeda jihadis who attacked the satirical magazine’ Charlie Hebdo’s headquarters in Paris in January 2015.

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