Five arrested near RAF Fairford as UK faces uncomfortable questions over base security

Five men have been arrested after a major incident was declared close to RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, police said, following reports of "suspicious vehicles" seen driving towards the airbase. Images showed armed officers and several police vans deployed in the surrounding countryside on Sunday, in what was described as a major counter-terrorism response.

The arrests came at a base of considerable strategic importance. Fairford has operated as a forward base for the US Air Force since the Cold War, and its two-mile runway was once long enough to serve as an emergency backup landing site for the US space shuttle programme. Today it serves a rather different purpose: it is the only airbase in Europe with the capability to launch the vast, long-range bombers President Donald Trump has used to strike Iran.

That single fact transforms Fairford from an American facility in rural England into a potential military target. Anyone hostile to the US-Israeli war with Tehran, or to the use of British territory in support of it, has a reason to regard the base as an obvious focus. As one senior figure put it when the threat was first made explicit, the base is a target "by definition."

Iran has not shied away from spelling that out. In July, Iran's foreign ministry accused the UK of being complicit in war crimes by permitting the US to use Fairford as a staging post for defensive strikes in its war against Tehran. It warned that "any party that, in any manner, participates in military aggression against Iran will bear responsibility for the consequences and repercussions of its decision." The language was read in London and elsewhere as an explicit threat aimed directly at Britain.

The timing of the incident is significant, coming amid a stalemate in diplomatic efforts to bring the war to an end. That deadlock has fuelled speculation that Tehran might seek to increase pressure on Washington — possibly through an attack far from the Middle East — in an attempt to shift the political dial ahead of the US midterm elections in November. A strike on, or near, an American launchpad in Britain would carry exactly the symbolic weight such a strategy would seek.

Britain's foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, made the threat explicit when he met his Iranian counterpart Abbas Araghchi at the United Nations last week. Miliband warned of the UK's "unwavering resolve to combat threats from Iranian-linked groups" and said Britain would not tolerate any "hostile activity" on its own soil. The words, delivered in New York, now read as a rather precise description of the job facing security agencies in Gloucestershire.

Attention has not been confined to Tehran, however. Some eyes have also turned to Moscow. Danish intelligence warned last week that Russia could, in the coming months, launch a limited military attack on a Nato country. Germany has already formally accused Russia of using a drone carrying explosives in an attempted attack on Leipzig in August. And over the summer, the Russian embassy in London warned the UK against allowing Ukraine to use British drones deep inside Russian territory, stating: "The deeper [the UK's] involvement in the conflict and the greater its support for Kyiv's terrorist machinery, the higher price it will pay." That, too, was interpreted as a direct threat.

Beyond state actors, investigators are also weighing the possibility of an Islamist attack, or an incident carried out by a group opposed both to the US-Israeli war on Iran and to the use of UK bases to launch strikes. That range of possibilities — Iranian, Russian, Islamist or independent — is precisely what makes the current inquiry so wide-ranging, and so slow to yield answers.

One central question is whether the authorities were ready for something of this kind. Security inside the base is handled by the US, while the UK is responsible for all threats outside the perimeter — a division of responsibility that becomes crucial when suspicious vehicles are spotted on roads approaching the site rather than on the base itself. The area of concern fell squarely in British jurisdiction.

Competing accounts of how the operation unfolded are already circulating. President Trump said the suspects had been under investigation "for a long time", suggesting a lengthy, pre-existing operation. There are also suggestions that the incident was foiled only because a passing driver reported unusual vans to the police — a more fortuitous chain of events. Both accounts may prove compatible, but the tension between them has not been resolved.

At the time of the explicit Iranian threat against the UK, a Ministry of Defence spokesman said: "Our armed forces are ready to keep the United Kingdom safe from any kind of attacks, whether it's on our soil or from abroad. The UK stands ready 24/7 to defend itself." The response near Fairford will be judged, in part, against that standard.

Five arrests is a beginning, not an answer. Nobody has been charged, no organisation has been named, and no state has been linked to the vehicles. The unanswered questions are the most important ones: was a hostile foreign state involved, or were proxies acting on its behalf? What was actually intended, and how serious was the potential risk to local people? Until those issues are settled, the incident near Gloucestershire remains, as the picture in Gloucestershire shows, more questions than answers.

The broader lesson is harder to avoid. A country that hosts the launchpads for another power's long-range bombers, while being an active participant in the conflicts those bombers are sent to fight, cannot assume the resulting threats will remain overseas. For all the reassurance of the last few days, that assumption was tested this weekend, and it is unlikely to be withdrawn.