Police are actively tracking Islamic extremists north of the border, the head of Scotland’s anti-terrorist squad has revealed.
Assistant Chief Constable Ruaraidh Nicolson said that his officers were keeping close watch on pockets of suspects feared to be planning terrorist attacks in Scotland.
Mr Nicolson was speaking after terrorists linked to Islamic State detonated suicide bombs in Brussels that killed 31 people.
He said that a similar attack could happen anywhere but added that the community engagement approach employed by his officers meant that the risk was less likely in Scotland.
Despite this, several young Scots have been radicalised by Islamic extremists. Mohammed Atif Siddique, of Alva, Clackmannanshire, was jailed for eight years for terrorist offences in 2007. Aqsa Mahmood, a Glasgow student, became known as the “jihadi bride” after travelling to Syria to marry a militant in 2013. Abdul Rakib Amin, who moved to Scotland with his family when he was ten and was educated in Aberdeen, appeared in an Isis recruitment video and was killed in an RAF drone strike in August last year.
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Mr Nicolson said: “Of course we’ll have pockets [of extremists] like everywhere else. It is something we monitor and we make sure it doesn’t manifest itself into causing difficulty, which we need to stamp out at every opportunity.
““My task is to look across the whole of Scotland. The important thing is knowing and understanding what’s going on”
“My task is to look across the whole of Scotland. The important thing is knowing and understanding what’s going on and actually having interventions where we need to have interventions.”
Mr Nicolson said that the nature of any attack was unlikely to be as sophisticated as those in Paris last year due to the relative difficulty of obtaining firearms.
Asked about where the threat would come from, he said: “It’s going to be from people who are already in the country. That’s likely not to be the kind of firearms capability we’ve seen in Paris because we believe the profile of firearms in Scotland is much lower. It’s much more likely to be an unsophisticated attack.”
Graeme Pearson, Scottish Labour’s justice spokesman and a former police officer, also raised concerns about radicalised Scots. “I would be loath to call them home-grown extremists but I think we will have disaffected people in our communities. We’ll have people who might be unbalanced in their view of what society is about.
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“One would hope that security services and Police Scotland have the necessary intelligence to identify that type of person and ensure that their movements are properly monitored and any real threat is dealt with at an early stage.”
Theresa May, the home secretary, has said that seven terrorist plots to attack the UK have been disrupted in the past 18 months. About 800 “people of interest” to the security and intelligence agencies had travelled to Syria and Iraq from the UK.