Record Number of Britons Training as Terrorists

A record number of British citizens are training as terrorists, British national security agency MI5 warned June 11.

More than 700 British citizens are believed to have traveled to Syria to fight alongside the Islamic State, and about half of them are believed to have returned to Britain.

Some of the suspected terrorists were previously unknown to MI5.

The agency reported that terrorist threats in Britain rose 30 percent since 2010. MI5 attributed that rise in terrorist threats to an increase in the “volume and accessibility of extremist propaganda,” most of which is distributed online. Advancements in technology have made it “increasingly challenging” for British security agencies to track suspected terrorists.