By Monday, the men had an outline, if not names. Counter-terrorism police said the five people arrested near RAF Fairford in the early hours of Sunday were all UK nationals, all resident in London, all aged between 23 and 25. They spoke of “multiple new lines of enquiry.” Where the men are being held, and what was found inside the three white vans they appear to have driven to the edge of an American bomber base, the authorities have not said. What began with a 12.45 a.m. call from a village is now a terrorism investigation with two countries telling different stories about it.
The established sequence is short. “Around 12.45am today police received a call relating to three suspicious vehicles travelling towards RAF Fairford,” said Assistant Chief Constable Richard Ocone of Gloucestershire. “Armed officers responded and subsequently arrested five men in the Whelford area on suspicion of committing offences under the Explosives Act.” Later on Sunday the five were arrested again, additionally, “on suspicion of preparation of a terrorist act,” the Metropolitan Police said. Eighty-five households were moved out in the early hours and taken to a leisure centre. “We believe this incident is contained,” the force said.
Aerial footage on Sunday showed a bomb disposal robot moving among the vans in nearby woods, the rear doors of two hanging open, large black items scattered on the ground. Materials seized under the Explosives Act are being examined, the Guardian understands, to determine how dangerous they were and whether they were technically capable of being used in an attack. CNN teams near the village later heard what sounded like two controlled detonations. Photographs in the British press showed the suspects shirtless, hands tied behind their backs.
Then there is the account of the woman who found them. A local farmer, speaking anonymously to CNN, said she came home late Saturday and “found both the driveway and the road blocked by three white vans,” parked in a strange formation. She believed there were more than five men, many with their faces covered. Some ran into a field, some toward the neighboring village. “My impression was that they were fit and young, they were all wearing similar dark clothes.”
She telephoned the Ministry of Defence police, who guard the base. No one answered. Another villager, Julian Tudsbury, told the Guardian the same thing had happened to the person who first reported the vans: “It just rang out so she dialled 999.” The farmer made her own call at 1:36 a.m. “Within 10 minutes, the village was full of armed police.” The police say their first call came at 12:45 — nearly an hour earlier. The distance between those two times is one of the things the investigation now contains.
Who saw the men first is already contested ground, because President Trump, speaking to reporters in Chicago on Monday, called the arrests “fantastic” and claimed the two governments had been watching the men for “a long time.” “They were looking to do big damage to our fort and working with the British worked out great,” he said. “We had them under view for a long time, and we got them.” The BBC, the Guardian and the Telegraph, citing sources, have all reported that the operation was not intelligence-led — that nobody knew of any plot before the vans were seen. UK authorities have not commented on the president’s assertion.
Defense Secretary Wes Streeting, doing the Monday interviews, thanked the vigilant resident but noted “she does only have a partial picture.” The work of the police and security services, he said, “takes place often unsung, unreported, for good reason.” Asked whether a hostile foreign state might be behind the incident, he said he did not “want to speculate at this stage of the investigation.” Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, at the Labour party conference, called the events “a reminder of the threats our country faces.”
The speculation exists because of where the vans were pointing. Fairford hosts the headquarters of the US Air Force’s 501st Combat Support Wing and the 420th Air Base Squadron and is, by the Air Force’s own description, the “preferred bomber forward operating location in Europe for USAF Global Strike Command.” American B-1 bombers have flown missions against Iran from its runways since March, when — after the US-Israeli war on Iran began on February 28 — the British government, then led by Sir Keir Starmer, permitted strikes on Iranian missile sites attacking shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Protests followed; this year’s Royal International Air Tattoo, the base’s annual air show, was cancelled. In July the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned that “any base used for aggression against Iranian territory constitutes a legitimate target for our forces.” A US Air Force spokesman said only that the wing will “remain vigilant,” declining, “for operational security reasons,” to discuss force protection.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham took updates from Liverpool, where, the Guardian reported, he cancelled a turn in a politicians-versus-journalists football match to take calls. Streeting leaned on the formula of the moment: “We can be reassured that this is being dealt with, and it is exactly why our emergency response teams and Armed Forces are on standby 24/7.” The local Liberal Democrat MP, Roz Savage, called the situation “worrying,” which in the vocabulary of the day was nearly plain speech.
The war at whose edges Whelford sits did not pause for it. On Monday, Al Jazeera reported, Brent crude rose more than 3 percent toward $108 a barrel after Trump rejected Iran’s proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days — the strait the Fairford bombers were sent to protect. The cordon around the woods remained. The police said they were working to get people back into their homes. The farmer, for her part, was not inclined to credit vigilance, hers or anyone’s: “I think it was pure luck that I arrived in the village at a similar time to the vans.”