Isis plotting chemical attack on UK: Watch for the enemy within, says minister. "There are traitors"

From Reuters and the Sunday Times

Islamic State militants have aspirations to launch mass-casualty chemical attacks on targets in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, the British security minister said in a newspaper interview published on Sunday.

Ben Wallace also said British authorities feared that as the militant group was driven out of strongholds in the Middle East such as the Iraqi city of Mosul, Britons fighting for the group would return home and pose a growing domestic threat.

“The ambition of IS or Daesh is definitely mass-casualty attacks,” Wallace told the Sunday Times newspaper.

“They have no moral objection to using chemical weapons against populations and if they could, they would in this country. The casualty figures that could be involved would be everybody’s worst fear.”

“There are traitors. We have to be on our guard for the enemy within,” Wallace said. Some of the biggest traitors are the politicians who let Islam in and continue to nurture it socially; halal, sharia, planning permision for mosques, the hijab as a standard part of institutional uniform…

“The insider threat, as we would call it, is real and it can be exploited and there are people trying to do that as we speak. If it’s hard to get in the front door, then what you try and do is get someone on the inside.” Wallace revealed his concerns as he urged the public to report suspicious behaviour to help identify “the enemy within”, including jihadists, foreign agents and colleagues corrupted by organised crime gangs.

Wallace pointed to the dismantlement of an Islamic State cell in Morocco in February as evidence of the group’s ambition to carry out chemical attacks elsewhere.

“Moroccan authorities dismantled a cell involving chemical weapons. They recovered toxic chemical and biological substances and a large stock of fertiliser. The substances found could have been used to produce home-made explosives and could have been transformed into a deadly toxin,” he said.

About 800 Britons are thought to have travelled to Syria, many to join Islamic State, since the outbreak of the civil war in that country. Around 100 have been killed.

“The big concern is if Mosul collapses and all the other bases of Isis (Islamic State) collapse. We know there are a significant number of [Britons] fighting for IS in Syria. They will probably want to come home,” said Wallace.