When a woman driving home to her Gloucestershire village in England in the early hours of Sunday morning found her driveway blocked by three white vans, she immediately called the police.
The call triggered a whirlwind of dramatic events; within 15 minutes, armed officers had swooped on the scene, and a major incident was declared at the nearby Royal Air Force (RAF) Fairford, a base United States bombers have used to strike Iran.
Recommended Stories
list of 4 itemsend of list
Some 85 homes were evacuated as a bomb disposal robot picked its way between the vans, and five British men in their 20s were arrested on suspicion of explosives and terrorism offences.
As army explosives experts examined the vehicles and counterterrorism detectives began questioning the suspects, US President Donald Trump, some 5,800km (3,600 miles) away, was already hailing the arrests.
“We had them under view for a long time, and we got them,” he told reporters on Sunday.
But Westminster was more cautious, with United Kingdom Prime Minister Andy Burnham urging people “not to speculate”.
Iran’s embassy in London said it “categorically rejects” any link, adding that such speculation would only “fuel Iranophobia propaganda in the UK”.
Then on Monday, all five men were released on bail, leaving Trump “surprised”. Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio went further, saying the incident “clearly involves the hands of a foreign actor”. He did not name one, though he noted that Iran had “openly threatened to attack American interests globally”.
The swift succession of arrests, claims and subsequent release has left a confused picture, raising questions about whether British authorities were indeed tracking the suspects – as Trump claimed – and whether the case is thinner than Washington suggests, say analysts.
But many analysts Al Jazeera spoke to said that the manner in which the suspects were released suggests that the UK government had little evidence, at least at this point, that the men were plotting a major attack.
From ‘World War III’ to ‘Four Lions’
Analysts said there were few signs of a sophisticated plot.
“If there had been any trace of explosives found in the vans, or any thoughts that these men were actually terrorists, they would not have been released,” Chris Phillips, a former head of the UK’s National Counter Terrorism Security Office, told Al Jazeera.
“It’s gone from World War III to Four Lions in four hours,” he said, referring to the 2010 British satire about a group of bumbling would-be suicide bombers.
Under the Terrorism Act 2000, police can hold terrorism suspects for up to 14 days without charge, he said, adding that officers who believed they had caught genuine attackers would use that time.
“You keep them, and you go through all their records and all their contacts and what they’ve been doing and what they’ve been talking about,” he said.
Afzal Ashraf, a visiting fellow in international relations and security at Loughborough University and a former senior Royal Air Force officer who served in Iraq, shares the same sentiment.
“If there had been any explosives, big or small, in those vans, then there is no way on Earth that the police would have released these individuals on bail,” he said.
Police have not said whether any explosives were found, with Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor stressing that the men “absolutely remain under investigation”.
Fuel thieves or ‘useful idiots’?
So, if not a terror plot, what was it?
One of the vans bore the logo “Fuel 2You”, which BBC Verify found no evidence of being a legitimate company.
Ashraf said many homes in the area, according to the internet, are not connected to the mains gas network and rely on heating oil stored in tanks in their gardens.
He said those tanks have become more valuable as fuel prices have soared during the Iran war.
“When you’ve got several hundred litres in gardens, that’s a bit of a killing for somebody,” he said, stressing that this was “an alternative and probably more plausible explanation” rather than a certainty.
“There’s absolutely nothing else at all, at the moment, suggesting that there is a link to any foreign government,” he added.
Phillips argued that the proximity to the base “may just be a complete fluke”.
“I’m absolutely certain there is intelligence that there are people in the UK that would love to attack,” he said. “But I’m not sure these guys are the ones.”
But not everyone is convinced.
Anthony Glees, emeritus professor of security and intelligence studies at the University of Buckingham, said the effort that went into the vans pointed to something planned.
“People do steal fuel, and students do do stupid things, but you wouldn’t go to the trouble and expense of taking three white vans to do so,” he said.
Instead, he believes the men were “useful idiots” who had “been hired at some expense” by a foreign state, not to carry out an attack but to stage one to “embarrass the British government”.
‘Narrative dominance’
If early indications suggest it was not a major terrorist plot, why, then, were Washington’s claims so emphatic?
For Ashraf, the explanation lies in the administration’s handling of the Iran war, which is driven by what he calls “narrative dominance”.
“This particular American administration hasn’t bothered with a strategy, a military strategy, or even a political strategy,” he said. “What it has worked on is a narrative strategy.”
On Trump’s claim that the men had been watched for “a long time”, he suspects a mix-up.
“What possibly has happened is that President Trump has been briefed about several groups, I would guess, that the Americans are tracking, which is normal,” he said.
He added that there may have been “some sort of conflation, which now the president has convinced himself is the same people”.
“Nobody’s going to tell the president he’s got it wrong,” he said.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, a longtime ally of Trump, posted on Monday that “Fairford proves my point on Iran and the IRGC”, referring to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
He had linked the incident to Iranian agents arriving in small boats, before police confirmed all five men were British nationals from London.
For Ashraf, whether the claims hold up may matter little to Trump.
“Even if it’s proven that this is basically a criminal act and nothing to do with terrorism, what he’s successfully done, in the minds of a lot of people, and people like Nigel have amplified it, is just reinforced that association that’s been going on for a long time,” he said.
“That is a hit. That is success as far as they’re concerned.”
A ‘frightener’?
Police have not ruled out foreign involvement.
Taylor said investigators were “considering this from every possible angle”. That included the possibility of “activity committed by proxies, or individuals either knowingly or unknowingly, working on behalf of a foreign state”.
Such plots are not new. MI5 Director General Ken McCallum said in October 2025 that the agency had tracked “more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots” in the UK in the space of a year.
Phillips explained how such recruitment typically works.
“They go onto the dark web, and they post, ‘Would someone like to do a job and make 10,000 pounds?’, as an example,” he said.
The person who carries out the job is often “four or five rungs down the line”, with no direct link to Iran or Russia.
Glees believes Fairford fits that pattern, and puts Iran “in pole position”, but he argued a real attack would have backfired on Tehran.
“If there had been an attack on RAF [Fairford], that would have been an attack on British soil, which would have meant Britain would have to be far more heavily involved in the war against Iran,” he said, adding, “Iran’s got no interest in that.”
Instead, he described it as “a frightener”, designed to embarrass the UK and perhaps make Trump feel the British “couldn’t be counted on”.
Ashraf is sceptical Tehran would take the risk at all.
He said Iran’s messaging has centred on the war being unpopular, even in the US, and that any plot endangering British or American civilians would undermine it.
If Iran had wanted to attack Fairford, he said, it probably would have assembled “a slightly more capable team”.
