A REPORT published in error on National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) website and quickly taken down, has revealed a secret plan for the deployment of 5,000 armed troops on the streets of the UK.
The military contingency plan, codenamed Operation Temperer, is revealed in the minutes of a NPCC meeting held on April 22nd at a hotel in Leicester. The plan would see troops guard key targets alongside armed police, providing ‘protective security’ against further attacks while troops and counter-terror experts and MI5 officers hunted down alleged terrorist plotters.
After this year’s Paris massacres, senior police officers discussed raising the terror threat level in Britain from ‘severe’ to the highest level of ‘critical’, meaning a terror attack is ‘imminent’ rather than ‘highly likely’. Under the heading ‘Counter Terrorism Post Paris Large Scale Military Support to the Police’, the NPCC meeting minutes reveal that deputy chief constable Simon Chesterman, the ‘national lead’ for armed policing, briefed the other chief officers.
The paper says up to 5,100 military personnel could be deployed ‘based upon force assessments of how many military officers could augment armed police officers engaged in protective security duties’. The minutes add: ‘Discussions were ongoing with government,’ saying: ‘Chiefs recognised that the army played an important part in national resilience and supported the work going forward.’
Yesterday it was revealed that prime minister Cameron has ordered that plans be drawn up for a new military intervention in Libya to take the fight to IS.
Days after the Tunisia beach massacre last month, security forces and emergency services held a major training exercise called Exercise Strong Tower which Cameron said would ‘test and refine the UK’s preparedness for dealing with a serious terrorist attack’.
