Teenager admits north London synagogue arson as seven held over alleged plot
A 17-year-old boy has admitted carrying out an arson attack on a synagogue in north-west London, becoming the first person convicted over a recent wave of attacks targeting venues linked to Jewish, Israeli and Iranian communities. His guilty plea on Tuesday coincided with the arrest of seven further individuals suspected of plotting a separate attack on the Jewish community.
What happened at Kenton United Synagogue
The teenager, a British national from Brent who cannot be identified for legal reasons, pleaded guilty at Westminster Magistrates’ Court to arson not endangering life. The charge relates to an incident on Saturday night, when a bottle containing an accelerant was thrown through the window of Kenton United Synagogue on Shaftesbury Avenue in Kenton.
The damage was limited. According to the Community Security Trust, a Jewish charity, the attack left minor smoke damage to an internal room but caused no significant structural harm. No-one was injured.
The boy was arrested by the Metropolitan Police the following day. District Judge Nina Tempia granted him bail subject to conditions, among them a requirement to live and sleep at his home address and to refrain from entering any synagogue. He is due to appear at Willesden Youth Court on 4 June. A 19-year-old man arrested in connection with the same incident has been released on bail pending further inquiries.
A wider counter-terrorism operation
The guilty plea emerged on the same day counter-terrorism officers announced a string of arrests over an alleged separate plot. Three men aged 24, 25 and 26 were detained in Harpenden, Hertfordshire on Sunday on suspicion of planning an arson attack targeting the Jewish community, with the intended venue still unknown. They have since been released on police bail.
On Monday, officers arrested a 25-year-old man in Stevenage. A 26-year-old man and two women, aged 50 and 59, were detained in a car in Birmingham. All three remain in custody at a London police station.
In an unrelated strand of inquiry, a 39-year-old man was arrested in Ealing on Tuesday under the Terrorism Act in connection with jars of a non-hazardous substance discovered in Kensington Gardens on 17 April. He too remains in custody.
Since late March, investigators have logged a sequence of attacks that includes arson targeting Jewish community ambulances in Golders Green, two synagogues and a former Jewish charity, along with an incident involving a drone flown close to the Israeli embassy. In total, 23 people have now been arrested over incidents linked to Jewish communities or those opposed to the Iranian regime.
Why police are focusing on ‘criminal proxies’
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vicki Evans, the senior national co-ordinator of Counter Terrorism Policing, described the teenager’s guilty plea as “a significant development, being the first conviction in relation to one of the recent spate of arson attacks on Jewish, Israeli or Iranian-linked venues.” She pledged that officers would be “relentless” in pursuing those behind the wider campaign.
A “key line of inquiry”, she said, concerns the possible use of criminal proxies — individuals paid to carry out arson attacks on behalf of others. While that strand of the investigation continues, Evans issued a direct warning to anyone considering involvement: “The stakes are high and it is absolutely not worth the risk.”
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said on Tuesday that the government “won’t relent in our fight against antisemitism and terror.”
A rising undercurrent of antisemitism
The recent attacks have deepened anxieties within the Jewish community, according to a report by BBC Panorama. The programme spoke to more than a dozen Jewish people from across the country — among them an NHS midwife, a student and a musician who had been kidnapped — who described what they characterised as a growing undercurrent of antisemitism in wider society.
Police and policy specialists working on the issue believe this climate has contributed to conditions enabling some of the most serious anti-Jewish hate crimes in recent British history, including the Manchester synagogue attack in which two men were killed. Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s independent reviewer of terror legislation, told Panorama: “I think that hatred in the public sphere towards Jews has made them more acceptable as a target for terrorism.”
The toll of this climate is also showing up in data. A recent survey by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, shared exclusively with Panorama, indicated that roughly one in five British Jews is now considering leaving the UK.
