Farmer who foiled suspected Iran terror plot on UK base blasts security and fears several terrorists still free

The farmer who raised the alarm over a suspected Iranian terror plot on a UK military base used by the US Air Force has blasted the lack of security there — while warning that several terrorists could still be on the run.The unidentified woman was heading home from a party just after 1 a.m.Sunday when she spotted a “large group of hooded and masked men” in three white vans acting suspiciously near RAF Fairford in southwest England.Shocked that security at the base hadn’t already spotted the suspicious group, she tried calling the UK’s Ministry of Defence — then called 999, the UK equivalent of 911, when no one answered.“I am absolutely staggered that it was left to me as a member of the public to see and report this,” she told the BBC.

“Someone really dropped the ball on this.”“A plucky amateur shouldn’t be spotting unusual activity at 1 a.m.when the air base is on high alert,” the local famer also told the UK’s Press Association. “I think it’s absolutely astonishing.

It’s pretty incredible, realizing you had a face-to-face brush with potential terrorists and may have foiled a terrorist plot.It was clear they had only just arrived.

Thank God we spotted them.”She believes the delay allowed several of the suspects to get away.She was “100% certain” that eight to 10 people fled into the trees when she encountered them, more than five, all local London men in their 20s, who have been arrested and quizzed on explosives and terrorism offenses.“When they saw me, they ran ahead of me, some into the field and some into the neighboring village,” she told the BBC, revealing the men started to “panic” when “dazzled”by her car’s headlights.She said the vans were parked in a “weird formation” and alluded to the “strange signage” on the vehicles.“When you live in Whelford, you notice everything,” she said of her tiny village of jusy 175 people.“I looked at it, and thought ‘that is not real.”Tristan Wilkin...