Police successfully foiled plans for a potential terror attack involving firearms in Scotland, the ‘British FBI’ has revealed.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) said the counter-terrorism probe was led by Police Scotland and centred on ‘the apparent preparation for a firearms attack in the Edinburgh area’.
Specialists from the NCA’s Major Crime Investigative Support unit were drafted in to aid the operation, including forensic clinical psychologists and behavioural investigative advisers.
The NCA is the UK’s lead agency against organised crime including human, weapon and drug trafficking, and cybercrime and economic crime.
Details were mentioned in a report to the board of the Scottish Police Authority
Its involvement in Operation Ferulic – the counter-terrorism probe which uncovered the potential threat – is mentioned
in its report to the board of the Scottish Police Authority, the civilian body that oversees policing.
The report details the NCA’s activities in Scotland between October 2023 and March this year.
It said more than 100 officers from the NCA, Police Scotland and a unit from the south-west of England executed 12 search warrants against organised crime group members based across Greater Glasgow.
This was part of a national investigation into fraud targeting vulnerable victims, with seven people arrested for money-laundering and fraud offences.
The NCA said it had helped Scottish police in scores of cases involving murder, rape, suspicious and unexplained deaths, and missing people.
The agency said its work had resulted in 131 cases where criminal activity was ‘disrupted’ in Scotland from October to March.
The NCA’s report discloses that Eastern European criminals have been trafficking women to the UK to work in Scottish brothels.
It said support was provided to a Police Scotland probe into the group, which is believed to force Romanian women as young as 18 into sex work. The gangsters, based in Scotland, attempted to launder £500,000 allegedly raised from the brothel operation.
Meanwhile, the NCA said 15 organisations in Scotland had been hit by ransomware attacks in the past two years, carried out by the LockBit criminal group.
Earlier this month, a Russian leader of LockBit – Dmitry Khoroshev – was unmasked and sanctioned by the UK, Australia and the US following an NCA-led international campaign.
Khoroshev, also known as LockBitSupp, thrived on anonymity and had offered a £7.9million reward to anyone who could reveal his identity. He will now be subject to a series of asset freezes and travel bans.
The operation targeting him formed part of an extensive and ongoing investigation into the LockBit group by the NCA, FBI, and international partners in the Operation Cronos taskforce.
