London police commissioner describes department’s work to disrupt Iran-backed retaliation plots

By Holmes Lybrand, Evan Perez, CNN

(CNN) — The war with Iran has raised concerns about possible retaliatory terrorist attacks in major cities such as London, where the police commissioner says they have intensified focus on possible threats.

But unlike in the US, where government officials have raised alarm of possible so-called Iranian sleeper cells, UK counterparts describe a more diffuse threat that could come from lone-wolf attacks.

Sir Mark Rowley, London’s police commissioner, told CNN in a recent interview that police had disrupted 20 plots in the last two years. Most have involved Iranian operatives seeking to hire attackers, some through the dark web, to target Iranian diaspora members who oppose the Tehran government and against Jewish institutions, he said.

“It’s sometimes ordinary criminals responding to adverts on the dark web, which is extraordinary, because it’s a different sort of state craft, isn’t it?” Rowley said of the recruitment efforts by Iran for hired gunmen, who he said were akin to “useful idiots.”

Rowley noted that the concept of sleeper cells — a fear expressed by Republican lawmakers and Trump officials that agents for Iran could be lurking in the US, ready to be activated for an attack — sounded “a bit Jason Bourne to me.”

“The idea of longterm strategic placement by Iran is not the core of what we have seen,” Rowley said.

The threat of short-term actors hired on Iran’s behalf remains.

On Wednesday, the Metropolitan police in London announced charges against two Iranian men accused of surveilling “locations and individuals linked to the Jewish community in the London area” for Iran’s intelligence service last summer.

The two men, arrested earlier this month, appeared in court Wednesday and have yet to enter pleas in the case, according to local media reports.

The threat of terrorist attacks and related threats was central part of the police commissioner’s discussions with top officials and key partners in the US during his trip to the United States, including the FBI, New York Police Department and beyond, he said.

In discussing London’s approach to crime, a city that saw a historical low in the homicide rate last year — 97 deaths, less than a third of New York City, which is comparable in population and also saw historical lows in homicides in 2025 — Rowley pointed to a technology that many Americans would rage against but which he says over 80% of Londoners approve of: surveillance paired with facial recognition.

The MPD has recently begun to deploy identifiable police vans equipped with cameras and facial recognition software in high traffic, high crime areas in the city. The recognition software uses datasets of people wanted by the police or who may be in violation of constrictions imposed by the court.

“It is a very narrow set of criminals who we are targeting through their images — dangerous wanted offenders and registered sex offenders,” Rowley said while adding that once a person is captured on camera who is not wanted by the police, their image is deleted.

The failure rate for such technology — identifying the wrong person — is exceptionally low, according to Rowley. Only 10 people were misidentified as being wanted by the police out of 3 million people whose images were captured, an MPD report published last fall found.

To operate such a program in a democratic society, Rowley said, “You have to keep coming back to, how do you nurture the trust?”

“The whole Western world, we’re all seeing, all this misinformation out there,” Rowley said. “Polarized politics, bot farms in Russia, all of this is attacking trust in the state and in the state’s institutions.”

“Ours is going up,” Rowley said of trust in the police in London.

The-CNN-Wire
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