Just after midnight on Sunday morning, a group of masked men in three vans were caught in the headlights of a passing car in the Cotswold countryside.
It is a sight capable of unnerving any driver. The encounter just 1,000ft from the perimeter of RAF Fairford led to the local farmer warning her neighbours via WhatsApp to lock their doors and contacting the police.
What she did not know was that the police were already rushing to the scene – having been tipped off by one of the masked men soon arrested on suspicion of terrorism offences.
On Tuesday night it emerged that one of the suspects had dialled 999 and told officers about their activities, leading to the major bomb scare which unfolded.
The revelation led experts on Tuesday night to suggest that Iran may have instigated the counter-terrorism operation to create panic and send a message to the US about how easy it would be to carry out a bomb attack at the base.
On Monday, just as the Prime Minister prepared to convene a Cobra meeting, terror police announced that the five men arrested at the scene had been released on bail. The decision left many scratching their heads. If this was a serious terror plot, then why on earth were they bailed?
On Tuesday night police confirmed what I had heard from my sources – that they were released after tests revealed their vans did not contain explosives, as had been feared.
So, were these men – five Londoners in their 20s – just in the wrong place at the wrong time? That seems unlikely.
Three white vans were probed by a wheeled robot attached to a bomb squad after five men were arrested
US Air Force bombers on the tarmac at RAF Fairford this week
Five men were photographed as police arrested them on terror charges near RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire. They are all British, from London, and in their 20s, police said – and have all been since released on bail
The head of Counter Terrorism Policing, Laurence Taylor, has made it clear the investigation is far from over and that the men remain ‘absolutely’ under investigation, despite the strange optics of their release from custody.
One line of enquiry, he has said, is that this ‘activity’ was carried out by people ‘either knowingly or unknowingly, working on behalf of a foreign state’.
So clearly one theory his officers are working on is that these men – driving vans bearing a fake phone number and the logo ‘Fuel 2You’ – may not have been fully aware of their mission. On Tuesday night police confirmed there was indeed a quantity of petrol inside the vans, which they seized as part of the investigation.
But it is unclear if there was anything else inside the vans.
It took a staggeringly long time for authorities to declare the scene safe. Something about it so spooked investigators – which included military bomb specialists as well as forensic experts – that they put up a 500m exclusion zone and evacuated 85 homes for two days. Ordinarily if a suspect package is found at a train station, it can take less than an hour to be examined and declared safe.
But the Army’s specialist explosive ordnance disposal team went back and forth all day on Sunday, delicately examining the three vehicles which appeared to contain multiple large black barrels.
The farmer said she thought the vans were suspicious because a phone number and lettering on the vehicles appeared to be fake. When she came across them in her car, they fled
Heavily armed personnel are seen at the main entrance to RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire
It is unlikely they found a fake device as this would have been evidence capable of bringing charges for perpetrating a deliberate bomb hoax. The suspects’ arrests, too, were unusual. Footage showed them cowering as they were held at gunpoint by armed officers around 1.30am.
Sitting in the middle of the road with their hands behind their back in restraints, all five had been stripped of their upper clothing by police fearing they may be wearing suicide vests. Officers have conducted searches of addresses linked to the suspects and will be trawling through their backgrounds, computers and phones.
They may be trying to ascertain if these men were on those country lanes of their own free will, or if they were sent as proxies by someone. If the latter, was that person operating on behalf of a foreign state?
And what was the endgame of any mission? Was it an Iranian-backed hoax – designed to spread panic or send a warning about their capabilities? Or was it a sinister decoy or dummy run in preparation for a possible terror attack?
Investigators seem to be considering whether the shadowy hand of Tehran played a part in these events and the security services are still taking this very seriously.
So too are the Americans, who use the Gloucestershire base to launch their bombers for air strikes against Iran. Within hours of the arrests on Sunday, Donald Trump was boasting to US reporters that a terrorist cell looking to ‘do big damage’ had been captured. After the suspects were bailed, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described a ‘serious threat’ that ‘clearly involves the hand of a foreign actor’.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard warned in July that any base used in strikes would be a legitimate target after the Iranian ambassador to London said the decision to allow US bombers to launch from Fairford had become an ‘important matter for our self–defence’.
The threat from the hostile state has been growing in the last year. A bomb plot or even a deliberate scare would be a significant escalation in the threat from Tehran, whose prior tactics against perceived enemies in the UK have been confined to arson, kidnap and attempted assassinations.
Mr Taylor warned in March that the war in Iran increased the risk of an attack in Britain. His prediction may well already have come true.
