denied any involvement<\/a> in the incident and the country\u2019s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, hit back at Burnham\u2019s allegations.<\/p>\n\u201cPM Burnham says the UK Government \u2018can confirm our belief that we believe Iran to have played a part\u2019 in the RAF Fairford incident,\u201d he wrote on X. \u201cI can confirm Iran\u2019s belief that releasing supposed terrorists working for foreign states really says it all. You\u2019re barking up the wrong tree.\u201d<\/p>\n
The RAF base 160km west of London has been used by US bombers during decades of conflicts in the Middle East, including the US and Israel\u2019s war on Iran, which began in February. Iran\u2019s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has previously said that it considers any base used to attack its territory a legitimate target.<\/p>\n
After three days of investigations, including using a bomb disposal team, police said Tuesday they had found no explosives in the vehicles, but they had retrieved a \u201cquantity of petrol\u201d.<\/p>\n
Top US officials have meanwhile criticised the decision to grant the suspects bail, with President Donald Trump saying \u201cI wouldn\u2019t have done that\u201d and Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying a lot of people were \u201cdisturbed\u201d by the move.<\/p>\n
Laurence Taylor, the head of British counterterror policing, said on Tuesday that the suspects remain under investigation and the decision to grant bail was grounded in \u201cexperience and strategy\u201d.<\/p>\n
He said a line of inquiry is whether the suspected offences were committed by \u201cproxies or individuals, either knowingly or unknowingly, working on behalf of a foreign state\u201d.<\/p>\n
Adding \u2060to the intrigue around Sunday\u2019s events, The Times reported that one of the men called emergency services shortly before being arrested in the early hours.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhether it was surveillance, a \u2018dry run\u2019 to test security or a stunt to \u200csend a message to the British government are all under consideration,\u201d The Times said, adding that investigators were unsure whether he got cold feet or it was part \u200cof \u200ca plan.<\/p>\n
The newspaper did not cite its sources.<\/p>\n
Police declined to comment on whether one of the suspects had made the call.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prime Minister Andy Burnham says the UK has \u2018strong indications\u2019 that Iran was involved in an alleged security…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":788171,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[924,141,591,59,57,58,31283,585,632,151,50,229,56,54,158,55],"class_list":["post-788170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-crime","tag-donald-trump","tag-europe","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-investigation","tag-iran","tag-middle-east","tag-military","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-united-states","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=788170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788170\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/788171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=788170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=788170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=788170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}