The United Kingdom’s government and law enforcement have all but admitted that the Iranian Islamic regime has been behind a spate of recent attacks against Jewish, Israeli, and Iranian dissident sites in the country, but have skirted around directly attributing them to Iran or even saying the Islamic Republic’s name.
The Metropolitan Police said in the wake of the Wednesday Golders Green stabbing, which wounded two, that it was officially declared a terrorist attack. According to the 2006 Terrorism Act, terrorism is an act designed to influence the government or public through the use of violence or a threat to advance a political, religious, or ideological cause.
Yet for all the information that has emerged about the 45-year-old Somali-born Essa Suleiman, little has been shared about his motive for racing around Golders Green with a knife. Yet the day of the attack, another actor was claiming that the motive was Islamist. Alleged Iranian front group Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia (HAYI) claimed responsibility for the attack.
Following the terrorist attack, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Center (JTAC) on Thursday raised the UK National Threat Level. While MI5 said on Friday that the Golders Green stabbings were not the sole reason for the elevation in vigilance, and that there had been a rise in Islamic and far-right radicals in the UK, the intelligence agency also acknowledged it was seeing “a sustained and significant tempo of state-linked threats, including to Jewish and Israeli individuals and institutions.”
MI5 did not name the state or states that the threats or Jewish or Israeli institutions were linked to, nor did the Home Office in a Friday X post, when it promised that they were “fast-tracking legislation to deal with malign state actors” following the Golders Green attack.
Legislation will be fast tracked in the coming weeks to clamp down on individuals and groups carrying out hostile activity for foreign states.
The Home Secretary will be given new powers to ban the activities of state-backed organisations who threaten our national security.
— Home Office (@ukhomeoffice) May 1, 2026
Prime Minister Keir Starmer, in a Friday speech, did mention Iran, saying fast-tracked legislation on the matter was needed because the government required “stronger power to tackle the malign threat posed by states like Iran, because we know for a fact that they want to harm British Jews.”
Yet Starmer didn’t link the Golders Green attack directly to that threat, with Iran just being one of many states that posed a risk. Further, the legislation was just one of many avenues, including shutting down charities that promoted extremism and preventing “hate preachers” from entering the country, that would be used to address a general problem of antisemitism.
Starmer said that the situation, listing a series of arson attacks that preceded the stabbing, that “this is about society, every bit as much as it is about security.” The remarks about Iran were lost among other issues, as part of the amorphous problem of antisemitism, rather than the state being a source of terrorism in the country.
Obfuscation of source of attacks by UK officials
This continued the obfuscation of the source of attacks by other officials, in which a potential actor was lost among the broader milieu of threats. On Wednesday, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley said in a statement following the Golders Green incident that antisemitism in the UK came from “hostile states, the extreme right, and the extreme left.
“We have seen a rise in racist and antisemitic hate crimes. And while I cannot comment on live investigations, we know that some individuals are being encouraged, persuaded, or paid to commit acts of violence on behalf of foreign organizations and hostile states,” Rowley said on Wednesday.
Again, Rowley wouldn’t say which hostile states and foreign organizations, though HAYI has claimed responsibility for attacks since March, including the Golders Green arson of four Hatzola ambulances that sparked the conflagration of incidents in London.
The concern about the hiring of mercenaries to commit acts of terrorism is not new, with Counter Terrorism senior national coordinator Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vicki Evans acknowledging on April 19 that the arson and other attacks in London that began in March may have employed criminals as proxies.
“We are considering whether this tactic is being used here in London – recruiting violence as a service,” Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vicki Evans said. “Individuals carrying out these crimes often have no allegiance to the cause and are taking quick cash for their crimes.”
Evans and the Met thought that the line of inquiry into the motives of the many attackers was sufficiently legitimate to repeatedly warn the public against it.
“To anyone even considering getting involved – my message to you would be this: The stakes are high, and it is absolutely not worth the risk for a small reward,” Evans said in the same statement. “Those tasking you will not be there when you are arrested and face court. You will be used once and thrown away without a second thought.”
While it has been long established that Iran used this tactic extensively, Evans only said on April 19 that it was a tactic that was being used, not that Iran was employing criminals in the recent wave of incidents.
Yet, The National and Sky News both revealed last week that their reporters interacted with Telegram accounts that attempted to hire them to commit acts of terrorism on behalf of Iranian intelligence. According to the Independent, Middle East minister Hamish Falconer summoned Iranian ambassador Seyed Ali Mousavi to admonish him for the diplomatic mission’s Telegram calls urging the UK’s Iranian diaspora to “sacrifice their lives for the homeland.”
Evans did say on April 19 that she was aware of public reporting that HAYI may have links to Iran, and that agencies were “alive to the threat of Iranian state aggression in the UK,” but these remarks fall just short of declaring Iran to be responsible for the arsons.
Security Minister Dan Jarvis, on April 20, called it inappropriate to comment about whether HAYI had links to Iran, given the ongoing investigation, but that “more generally, we have and will continue to hold Iran to account for its hostile acts.”
“Whether linked to Iran or to any other source, we will never tolerate hostile activity on British soil,” said Jarvis.
While ministers, officers, and leaders have been reluctant to explicitly link HAYI to Iran, the signs of that connection are difficult to ignore. The group appeared out of the ether in March, with little online infrastructure to its name, yet was somehow able to establish cells across Europe to conduct a variety of attacks on Jewish sites.
Its statements are posted across the channels of Iranian regime-affiliated accounts, and its logo bears the aesthetic hallmarks of an Iranian proxy, with imagery of a fist clutching a rifle and the backdrop of a globe. With little more than statements, logos, and paid criminals to its name, HAYI may be nothing more than a brand for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to launder its involvement and provide plausible deniability.
Strong suspicion is warranted, given the long history of Iran using criminal proxies for terrorism in just the UK alone. In 2024, the UK published an Intelligence and Security Committee report that said Iran was using proxy groups, including criminal networks, militant and terrorist organizations, and hacking groups, to provide it with a means of plausible deniability when attacking enemies. Tehran had allegedly used the method at least 15 times from 2022 to 2024 to attempt to murder or kidnap Jewish or Iranian dissident UK nationals or residents. MI5 director general Ken McCallum said in October that in one year his agency had tracked twenty potentially lethal Iran-backed plots.
In warning about Iranian aggression and tactics in the past, the security infrastructure of the UK has not been shy about attributing attacks on its soil to Iran. Yet throughout the UK government and institutions, naming Iran, the IRGC, or even HAYI at times, has been avoided in favor of the more nebulous and anonymous “hostile states” and “state-linked actors.” This could be, as officials have claimed, that they are still in the middle of investigations and cannot reveal information that would impinge on law enforcement’s probes.
Yet if Iran is responsible, confirmation of overarching Iranian action may not necessarily impact individual criminal cases, and public action against the Islamic regime could stop additional attacks. Another possibility is that if UK officials say the name of the State-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, they must take action. As HAYI may be providing plausible deniability for Iran, referring to You-Know-Who may provide the UK with the plausible deniability it needs to avoid having to take a diplomatically fraught strong stance.
