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BBC unearths IS terrorist recruitment

A BBC investigation has found evidence of Islamic State (IS) agents trying to recruit terrorists for attacks on central London in 2016. Undercover reporters from BBC Inside Out London posing as UK teenagers contacted IS recruiters who suggested they carry out attacks on Westminster and London Bridge. BBC Inside Out London then passed the information to the security services. Reporters were in contact with people verified by the security services as senior IS recruiters for more than two years, posing as fictional characters committed to jihad. Last July, they discovered the terrorist group was scouting for British Muslims on social media to carry out attacks at specific London locations. The reporters began talking to one of the recruiters, who then invited them to chat privately on a secure messaging site. The recruiter asked the reporter if he knew Westminster, and told him it was a good target because it was busy and crowded. In December 2016, a second IS agent told the reporter to ’make the Kuffar [non believers] scared. Kill a lot. The best way you can do it is to kill normal people’. He then directed him to a terrorist manual on the internet, which outlined the strategy of using vehicles as weapons and explained how to target vulnerable parts of the body with a knife. Security services believe the perpetrators of the Westminster and London Bridge attacks engaged via encrypted messages with IS. Months later, the recruiter directed the reporter to bomb-making instructions on the internet. Another video showed how to make a fake suicide best and claimed if an attacker wore the vest and stood next to civilians ‘the police would not apprehend or kill you’. Raffaella Pantucci, an expert on counter terrorism at RUSI, said the messages were ‘highly significant’. He said: “This is the first time that the online direction approach has so clearly been linked to London, and laid out in such detail.” Ben Wallace, Security Minister, said: “Here was definitely usage of encrypted communicating between planners and terrorist and people that carried out some of those dreadful attacks. "That I am afraid is common throughout every one of these incidents and there is also a role of watching videos online to either prepare themselves or train themselves. I think that they are both, I am afraid, current occurrences in these terrorist attacks.” Jamie Bartlett, director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media, said: “Encrypted apps or anonymous web browsers or the dark net, these places online that are very, very difficult to properly monitor, are proliferating very quickly.”

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