A former MI6 spy has claimed a new 9/11 or 7/7 attack could come at any time due to the presence of ‘hundreds’ of potential Al-Qaida sleeper agents living in the UK.
Aimen Dean, a former member of Al-Qaida who spent eight years working in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) gathering vital intelligence for MI5 and MI6, says the biggest threat to the west is the spread of Islamic extremism and Iranian influence.
‘It’s not about if another 9/11 or 7/7 attack will happen; it’s about when,’ he told the Sun.
Mr Dean’s risky work while a member of the terror group helped to foil significant Al-Qaida terror plots, including one that would have targeted passengers on the subway in New York.
Now he has shared his concerns that there could be ‘hundreds’ of sleeper members of the organisation in the UK and that the west is wrongly focussing on Russia as the number one enemy.
Mr Dean claims it is Iran that should be the focus of government policy in order to protect the British people.
He says the country was responsible for ‘hosting’ Al-Qaida for 25 years, opening up opportunities for so-called ‘sleeper cells’ to carry out attacks on British nationals, including fatal assaults on Brits in the UAE.
‘Unfortunately, I would love to tell you the world is an amazing place, but it’s not,’ Mr Dean said.
Aimen Dean, a former member of Al-Qaida who spent eight years working in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) gathering vital intelligence for MI5 and MI6, says the biggest threat to the west is the spread of Islamic extremism and Iranian influence
He has claimed that it is a matter of ‘when’ another attack such as 9/11 (pictured) or the 7/7 bombings happens and that there are ‘hundreds’ of Al-Qaida sleeper agents in the UK
‘A threat like Iran needs to be countered because of the fact that they are a nation that has sponsored terrorism.’
He is predicting more ‘lone-wolf’ style attacks in the future and says that although it is ‘impossible’ to estimate exactly how many potential Al-Qaida members are in the UK, it is at least ‘hundreds’.
Mr Dean argues these sleeper agents could be utilised to carry out a terror attack at any time.
The father-of-one was 17 when he met Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, after spending a year fighting in the Bosnian war.
At 18, he travelled to the mountains in Afghanistan where he spent 11 months learning how to build bombs. Mr Dean told how as a self-confessed ‘nerd’, the mathematical side to the process appealed to him.
He went on to spend time bomb-making in the company of some of the world’s most wanted men, including Moez Fezzani, now an ISIS leader in Libya, and terror mastermind Abu Khabab.
Khabab was in charge of developing Al-Qaida’s mass-casualty weapons up until his death thanks to a CIA drone strike in 2008.
But Mr Dean, who had originally pledged his allegiance to Al-Qaida’s Osama Bin Laden in person, had been in the group barely a year when a devastating suicide bomb attack in East Africa changed his outlook on life for good.
The attacks on American embassies in 1998 in Nairobi, Kenya and Tanzania killed 200 people and injured another 4,000.
Mr Dean originally pledged his allegiance to Al-Qaida as a teenager in person to Osama Bin Laden (pictured)
Mr Dean says it was this moment that made him realise he had taken the wrong path.
To escape the group’s clutches, Mr Dean pretended to have fallen ill and travelled to Qatar, where he renounced Al-Qaida.
But his life took another dramatic turn when he was approached by MI6 agents just nine days later.
After confirming he had truly left the group, and recognising his knack for key skills such as map reading, the spy agency rushed him back to the UK as their latest asset.
Mr Dean was later able to return to working with Al-Qaida, all the while smuggling secrets to MI6 which are thought to have helped save hundreds, if not thousands of lives.
But he revealed the terror of being discovered by the group, recounting how he once was certain he had been found out after being summoned to meet with one of Osama bin Laden’s closest allies in 2001.
Fortunately for Mr Dean, at the meeting he was instead asked to deliver a message to four ‘brothers’ in London and tell them to leave the country.
He said the message read: ‘They must leave the country and come here before September 1. Something big is going to happen and we expect the Americans to come to Afghanistan.’
A few months later, the 9/11 attacks took place killing around 3,000 people. Mr Dean did not have any prior knowledge of the attacks themselves.
It was soon after this that Mr Dean caught wind of the plot for the New York subway, organised by Khabab. His tip meant the attack was foiled, no doubt saving countless lives.
While a member of the group, Mr Dean managed to penetrate the ranks of al-Qaida, from Osama bin Laden at the top, to sinister recruiting agents and rabble-rousers such as hook-handed Abu Hamza in the Finsbury Park Mosque in London.
Aimen Dean’s cover was blown after an article was published on the website of Time magazine.
He was not named, as such, but enough of the story was true for al-Qaeda to put two and two together and identify him.
He was swiftly in touch with his MI5 and MI6 minders and raced to London, where he was put in a safe house and given a new name. He later published a tell-all memoir about his time as an undercover agent.
