A farmer’s vigilance foiled a major Iranian terrorist attack on RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire. The farmer thought three large white vans looked suspicious and called the police emergency number. They were quickly on the scene and arrested five men. Iran has explicitly said that bases used by the United States are legitimate targets.
In connection with a suspected Iranian plot, five men in three vans full of explosives were stopped 350 yards from RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire early yesterday. US forces have used the base to carry out air strikes against the regime in Tehran.
When counter-terrorism police responded after a farmer had called 999 and arrested the men, US President Donald Trump said: ‘They intended to inflict great damage on our fortress.’
It was a female farmer who alerted the police. She was driving home from a party early on Sunday morning when she noticed three white vans parked and blocking a farm road in a quiet rural area. She lives in the village of Whelford. The woman called the police, who responded promptly.
What unfolded was far more dramatic than the impression given by the media:
Confused, she turned her car around. As she did so, she saw men who ‘looked as though they were from the Middle East’, wearing balaclavas and hoodies, spreading out into the woods and across the fields towards the base.
The quick-thinking hero drove swiftly away and called the police at 00.45, before sending a message to her local WhatsApp group warning people to lock their doors.
Police were at the scene within 15 minutes and apprehended the five men a few minutes later.
The farmer believes that the chance encounter frightened the gang.
‘They must have seen the bright headlights,’ she said. ‘They probably thought we were the police (and) panicked.’
She added: ‘It seems that by doing this I simply put a stop to whatever they had planned.’
She said the vans looked suspicious because a telephone number and lettering on them appeared to be fake. Fuel2U, a fuel-supply company in Beaconsfield, said that the vans had nothing to do with the company.
In frightening footage filmed by local residents, the suspects were held at gunpoint by armed police officers. As they sat in the middle of the road with their hands bound behind their backs, the men were bare-chested after police officers had removed their upper clothing for fear that they might be wearing suicide vests.
Eighty-five households were evacuated in case the explosives in the vehicles detonated. Residents were taken by bus to a local community centre and, as of Sunday evening, had still not been allowed to return home.
The operation had a certain degree of sophistication. They had a company logo on the sides; the company itself was genuine enough, but the vehicles were not, and that in itself suggests planning with malicious intent.
The vehicles were full of large drums containing a liquid substance, believed to be ammonium nitrate, and it is possible that a suicide attack was planned.
Things could have turned out very differently. When the female farmer called the number that local residents had been given for the Ministry of Defence, no one answered. She had to call the local police number. They were there within 15 minutes.
Had the men not blocked the road, it is not certain that the woman would have reacted. She had to turn the car around, and it was then that she saw men in balaclavas fleeing into the woods. She said it was nerve-racking to be so close to terrorism.
Trump spoke on Sunday as though the intelligence services had been following the plot for a long time, but that certainly did not apply to the British police, who were caught off guard. The terrorist attack could therefore have had an entirely different outcome.
It is taken for granted that Iran was behind it.
Not long ago, a judgement was handed down against two men who attempted to kill a journalist who worked for the newspaper Iran International. Pictures of him had been displayed in Tehran with a notice saying that he was ‘wanted’.
The regime is far more deadly than the impression created by the Western media.
One need only recall the attempted assassination of William Nygaard in 1993.
Last month, The Telegraph revealed that Iran shut down a British power station earlier this year in an unprecedented cyberattack. The facility was out of operation for four days while staff struggled to get it up and running again.
It is believed to be the first time that hackers linked to the Iranian regime have managed to shut down such a facility in Britain, and it is regarded as the most successful cyberattack of its kind.
Iran is particularly poisonous in its attacks on Jews; this applies to Jews throughout the world. One need only recall Argentina. But recently they have been active on British soil.
Ken McCallum, Director General of MI5, said in October last year that more than 20 additional potentially lethal, Iranian-backed plots had been foiled over the previous 12 months.
In July, the government accused the ‘Islamic Movement of the Righteous’ – an Iranian-backed proxy group – and imposed sanctions on it for a series of arson attacks and acts of vandalism against Jewish sites.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/09/27/bomb-squad-sent-to-village-near-raf-base-several-arrested/
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16165239/Iran-bomb-plot-RAF-base.html
