Newsmax: "Britain Tracking 1,600 Terrorists"

A swamp in need of draining:

British authorities are tracking almost 30 terrorist plots involving 1,600 individuals, the head of the country's MI5 spy agency said, warning that young British Muslims are at risk of being radicalized by extremists.

More than a year after the suicide attacks on London's transit system, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller predicted the fight against terrorism would last a generation.

"It is a sustained campaign, not a series of isolated incidents," she said in a speech to a small audience of academics Thursday, according to a transcript released by the spy agency on Friday. "Radicalizing elements within communities are trying to exploit grievances for terrorist purposes."

"It is the youth who are being actively targeted, groomed, radicalized and set on a path that frighteningly quickly could end in their involvement in mass murder of their fellow U.K. citizens, or their early death in a suicide attack or on a foreign battlefield," she said.

Manningham-Buller said MI5 had foiled five major plots since the July 2005 transit bomb attacks in London, which killed 52 commuters and the four suicide bombers.

Officials are also "aware of numerous plots to kill people and to damage our economy," she said. "What do I mean by numerous? Five? Ten? No, nearer 30 that we currently know of." [...]

Manningham-Buller, who has headed MI5 since 2002, warned that radicalization, especially of young people, was one of the biggest problems facing anti-terror investigators. Three of the four men who attacked three London subways and a red double-decker bus on July 7, 2005, were British-born.

"More and more people are moving from passive sympathy towards active terrorism through being radicalized or indoctrinated by friends, families, in organized training events here and overseas, by images on television, through chat rooms and Web sites on the internet," she said.

Tags: terror, Britain, Muslims