LONDON, October 16. /TASS/. The number of people being investigated in the United Kingdom for actions threatening national security has risen by 35% over the past year, Ken McCallum, director general of the British intelligence agency MI5, said.

According to him, the countries behind those people primarily include Russia, China and Iran.

"In the last year, we’ve seen a 35% increase in the number of individuals we’re investigating for involvement in state threat activity," McCallum pointed out, presenting an annual report on threats to the United Kingdom.

"We are in a new era. MI5’s fight against terrorism remains intense: my teams are running near-record volumes of investigations. But we are also having to contend with a second menace of equal or even greater scale, in fast-rising state threats," the intelligence chief noted. He claimed that other countries were "consistently descending into ugly methods MI5 is more used to seeing in our terrorism casework." In this regard, McCallum pointed to surveillance, sabotage, arson and physical violence attempts.

The MI5 director general mentioned the six Bulgarian nationals who had been sentenced by a London court in May to prison terms ranging between five and ten years on charges of spying for Russia. He also pointed to an investigation into an arson attack on a London warehouse containing supplies for Ukraine. The Russian Embassy said earlier, commenting on those investigations, that London sought to step up an anti-Russian propaganda and disinformation campaign to distract the public from domestic problems and Ukraine’s difficult situation in the conflict with Russia.

"When it comes to China, the UK needs to defend resolutely against threats," McCallum went on to say. Speaking of Tehran, he claimed that "MI5 has tracked more than twenty potentially lethal Iran-backed plots" in just one year.

According to the intelligence chief, "since the start of 2020, MI5 and the police have disrupted 19 late-stage attack plots."