 Mae'r syfyllfa'i rhaid i mi allan yn ôl... Mae'r gwahyr be'r peth gynhwr llwyddiad hwnna, y lle'r Llywodraeth Cymru i'r surelylion Cymrae, mae'r ddau yn hyn o'r ddau. Pryddoch yn gwneud cael eu cyflwyn o'r dweud, a chynau'r dyfodol yn y gallan yn y panelodания. Mae'r ddau'r cyflwyn o'r ddau, a'r ddau'r cyflwyn o'r ddau'r ddau ar y cwymau. I'm delighted to be here and to be asked on behalf of the Institute to chair this session where our colleagues here, which I'll introduce in a moment, are going to launch a paper in relation to the crime terror nexus. This is a project involving King's College in London and Pantiray Research Limited, and our two speakers are going to be Professor Dr Peter Newman and Rajan Bajor. What the project is about is presenting an overview of the links between crime and terrorism. A difficult subject in the form of police officer, down through the years I would have known that that's a big challenge and a lot of commentators have different views on it. So I'm delighted to know that we have people who have done some research on it and open the debate so to speak in relation to it. There's always been a difficulty. Our first speaker will be on my right here, Dr Peter Newman. Peter is a Professor of Security Studies at the Department of War Studies, King's College in London, and has directed the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation since its foundation in 2008. He has written a number of books, including Radicalised, No Jihadist and the Tread Against the West, and he also has produced a number of policy reports in this particular area. He currently serves as the OSCE Chairman, Chairman's Special Grant. Until the end of the year. It's gone. It's gone. It's gone. It's gone. It's gone. It's gone. It's gone. It's gone. He was a senior consultant for the US mission to the United Nations during the process of crafting during Security Council resolution on foreign terrorist fighters. I have no doubt that Peter is imminently so to speak to us on this topic and he also studied in Northern Ireland a number of years ago. Our second speaker is Mr Rajan Bajra, who is Head of Research and Terrorism for Cantoray Research Limited, which is a UK-based research organisation, and has specialised in counterterrorism financing and links between terror and crime among European jihadists. He walks closely with Professor Newman and he has become one of Europe's leading experts in the crime terror mixes. So what I'd further to do, I'm going to ask Peter to speak to us for 15 or 30 minutes or so, but I ask you to maybe use the podium if you want to deal with what you've been doing from here, if it suits you, whatever suits you. Because we're switching around. Okay, that's okay. Great. Excellent. Well, thank you very much and thank you for the opportunity to speak to you in Dublin. As my colleague has said, my name is Peter Newman, I'm director of ICSR and Rajan and I started looking at links between terrorism and crime two years ago now. And we were first focusing on jihadists in Europe and then gradually also becoming interested in other kinds of links between terrorism and crime, looking at what came to be called the crime terror nexus. And we were lucky enough to receive a grant that allows us now to investigate these links in all 28 member states of the European Union. And this is the first of 15 reports that will be published over the course of this year, focusing on the UK and Ireland. At the three areas where we've been able to identify links between terrorism and crime are the following. The first among paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland, which are deeply and remain deeply involved in organized crime in Northern Ireland, in the border area, and of course also in the Republic. Secondly, in British prisons where we have seen evidence of criminal and terrorist linkages and connections and cross fertilizing. Thirdly, amongst British jihadists who before radicalizing used to be in many cases criminals and whose skills that they acquired as criminals may in some cases be used for terrorist purposes. That brings me to one of the key points. Why does it matter? Why is it a problem when criminals and terrorists link up? Why is it a problem when crime and terrorism cross fertilizes? Very simply, because it makes both of these problems worse. It allows both of these phenomena to become more entrenched. In the case of jihadists, for example, it makes it possible for terrorists to use and utilize criminal skills, more easily get hold of weapons, more easily fund themselves and more easily acquire forged documents. From a government and law enforcement perspective, it is a good thing to watch out for these links, to prevent them from emerging and to counter them where they exist. I do not want to bore you with a lot of theory and conceptual stuff, and Rajan will give you a baseline assessment of organized crime and terrorism in a second. But just for a second, let me tell you that there are in the literature three types of links between crime and terrorism that have been identified. One is if you want an institutional nexus, which is about formalized collaboration between organized crime groups and terrorist groups. This is about groups collaborating. A second version of the crime terror nexus is what we call an organization nexus, which talks about organizations where it's not entirely clear whether they are purely criminal or whether they also have a political agenda. In fact, in many of these cases, it can shift from one to the other. The third nexus, if you want, the third type of nexus is of terrorist organizations who are recruiting from criminal miliws. This is particularly prominent in the case of ISIS recruitment in Europe. ISIS in Europe has attracted a lot of people with criminal pasts in some European countries. A majority of the recruits that ended up joining ISIS used to be involved in petty crime or in some cases organized crime before. In fact, if you look at these three types of crime terror nexus, we have found evidence of all three types across the islands of Ireland and Britain. Now over to Rajan for an overview of organized crime and terrorism in UK and Ireland. Just to give you a snapshot of the crime situation in UK and Ireland, the number is very quite a bit. The UK's NCA, they estimate there are around 6,000 organized crime groups operating in the UK with 40,000 individuals involved. Here in Ireland, the statistics from the garden are a little less publicly available, but the last open source statistic that was available is from a couple of years ago said that there was action against about 600 organized crime groups here in Ireland. But they didn't disclose the number of individuals involved. And when we look at the kind of activities, the behaviors and the locations that they're involved in, we see two things. The first is that they're really diverse, and I don't mean ethnically diverse. In fact, the majority of organized crime groups in the UK and Ireland are either Irish or British, although there are in some markets, so let's say in the opium trafficking in the UK, it's dominated by Pakistani crime groups. Famously, Albanian crime groups are musling in on the cocaine trade in the UK as well. I mean diverse in terms of their organizational arrangements, right? So you still have these hierarchical, traditional, top-down, family-orientated crime groups, but you increasingly have more loose networked crime groups as well, which afford more autonomy to their individual members. So this is why you would see crime groups cooperating with other crime groups, which you perhaps wouldn't have anticipated before. And as well as this, you even see criminals selling, or is essentially their business, to other criminals as well. So in the UK, we see this with drugs supply lines, the county lines, as they're called, from London to the surrounding areas. They're also diverse in terms of the activities they're involved in, right? So organized crime could be anything from human trafficking for labour or sexual exploitation, to weapons smuggling, to wholesale importation of drugs down to street-level dealing, to more traditional crime activities like extortion or more novel innovations like cybercrime and new aspects of fraud. We also see that they're very responsive, and they're responsive to law enforcement behaviour. It's a very true cliché that it's a cat-and-mouse game. They're constantly adapting and responding to how law enforcement cracks down on them. But they're also responsive to new market opportunities, right? They're essentially criminal entrepreneurs. If they see a gap in the market, they will look to fill that. And this is something that you can see in pharmaceutical trade. So we spoke with the UK's Medicine and Health Products Regulatory Agency. It sounds very, very boring, but they do some pretty interesting work. And they said in recent years it's been a significant rise in the illegal importation of unlicensed pharmaceuticals from countries such as India where they're produced on mass because it's just a low risk, high reward market. And if you look at it, it's really easy to see why, right? It's such a simple business operating model. It's not really a priority for law enforcement. And if you are arrested for this, it's unlikely to result in a custodial sentence, mostly just defined. There's not really violence involved in it. And so you can see why criminals would look to exploit this. So this is just a snapshot of the crime scene. If we look to the situation of terrorism, well, foremost on everyone's mind is of course the situation with jihadism. And in the UK, the threat is perhaps as severe as it's been since 2001. And this is because the threat itself is so diverse. You're looking at low-nacted plots, highly networked cells. You're looking at really rudimentary attacks with vehicle ramings, knife stabbings to coordinated bombings. You're looking at people that were born and raised in the UK, homegrown jihadists, as well as those that have travelled abroad, returned or in contact and directed with people overseas. It's also perhaps gone against some stereotypes about jihadism, so women have recently become involved in some plots. And this is all reflected in the attack scene in the UK last year, the number of plots and the arrests that have also seemed to be ever increasing year on year. So in Ireland, the situation is very different. I don't think the jihadist threat is anywhere near what it is like in the UK. It's a very different scenario. But where Ireland does obviously see the issue of terrorism is with paramilitarism. And just last month the British security service said that Northern Ireland is probably the most concentrated area of terrorist activity in all of Europe. And you can see this with a steady drumbre of terrorist attacks. So in the last five years there have been almost 350 shootings relating to Northern Ireland terrorism. As well as over 250 bombing incidents as well. And there's also a steady seizure of explosives, of firearms and of course the number of people arrested. And it's widely understood that all groups, whether they've actively been involved in decommissioning efforts, maintain access to weapons or arsenal of weapons as well. There's another terrorist situation that you see and that's with the far right. And of course in recent years there's been a resurgence of the general far right across Europe, especially in the UK with street movements as well. Occasionally from these subcultures lone actor terrorists emerge so you could think of Tommy Mer who murdered Joe Cox MP. But generally relative to the threat of jihadist and Northern Ireland related terrorism, the threat of far right terrorism is low. So that's the snapshot of the crime and terrorist situations in the UK and Ireland and we can now discuss where the actual nexus occurs. Right. So Rajan and I will now briefly touch upon the three areas where we've identified links. The first is that I want to highlight is on British prisons in particular. Prisons have always of course been places that were significant in relation to this particular phenomenon. That's because physically this is where criminals and terrorists are in the closest proximity. It's because when people enter prison they often ask themselves existential questions. They are open for new ideas and value systems. They experience a severe form of dislocation. They are cut off from their traditional social networks, from their families and friends. They sometimes if the prisoners bad need protection. So prisons matter. They are places where people network. We know that in Britain for example the number of jihadist prisoners has risen almost trebled over the past six or seven years. This is a big issue in British prisons specifically related to jihadists. Muslims make up 15% of prisoners across the UK in some high security prisons. The number can go up to 20% to 25%. The number of Muslim prisoners has been rising for all sorts of reasons over the past ten years. Very significantly it's said to have doubled. That's of course not a problem per se. Religion in fact, religious conversion can have a very positive influence on prisoners. But we're also seeing the rise of so-called Muslim prison gangs which are not terrorist groups. They are based on identity. They enforce strict rules. They are sometimes quite aggressive and coerce other prisoners for example to convert. This is a problematic phenomenon partly also because partly out of bravado I guess. These prison gangs are glorifying terrorism. They often declare themselves to be supporters of ISIS and Al Qaeda. It's not clear to what extent that actually continues to be the case after people leave prison. But because the prison authorities in Britain have downplayed this phenomenon for such a long time and have been quite intransparent about the existence of it, we do not really have concrete figures as to whether these are anecdotal stories or whether they really systematically exist across the system. A second problematic aspect is of course the increasing number of convicted terrorists which has risen sharply and we are documenting in our report one case where convicted terrorists actually started networking with each other in prison construing a plot that was then attempted to have been carried out outside of prison after their release. And this happens not only in relation to jihadist terrorism. It also happens in relation for example to sectarian groups in Scotland and Northern Ireland. This is one particularly prominent example Anton Duffy from Donegal who lived in Scotland and wanted to assassinate a couple of years ago two prominent loyalist leaders including Johnny Adair. Whilst he was in prison he recruited a member of his group and he also tried to acquire an AK-47 and a revolver from criminals who were part of the same prison. In other words it would have been more difficult for him to conceive of his plan and to actually carry it out to some extent without his presence in prison, prison to some extent facilitated at the plot. I know that very well because I served as an expert witness in the trial that finally got him convicted and Anton Duffy was not a former member of the real IRA or the new IRA. He was a committed Irish Republican but even these dissident groups considered him to be too crazy to be part of their groups and he wanted to carry out this attack on Johnny Adair in order to get himself noticed and get credibility with the leadership of these groups so they would eventually take him in. He also started talking about starting a sectarian war in Northern Ireland. So he was clearly out there on the scale somewhere and fortunately it was not possible for him to carry out his plot. At the same time it has to be said that without prison it would have been much more difficult for him to get the connections and to make it happen. So we also see this nexus amongst British jihadists and this is even born out by statistics. So a recent study of the UK's police national computer which logs everyone's convictions found that almost half of British converts travelled to Syria, had convictions on that system. As early as 2012, as of 2015, were analysing their subjects of interest, their nominals and they found that over 40% of those nominals had common convictions. So then they shifted their strategy to this so-called Al Capone approach. If you can't convict them for their extremist-related activities you would look to pick them up for petty frauds and common crimes, even some drug dealing, whatever you could do to disrupt their activities as extremists or even just as common criminals as well. What we find more generally is that often jihadists emerge from these subcultures where they're fluent with criminal networks as well. And this is reflected in the propaganda that these groups produce. So you can consider this group, they've got this fantastic logo right of Tauheed. They were a British jihadist group that were active in Syria and they would post so much propaganda online back when it was much more accessible. They would post it on Twitter, Instagram, on a Facebook page and so on. And often their message was targeting those from a criminal background. So two of their posters, for giving it the first drop of his blood and sometimes people with the worst past create the best futures, heavily playing on this idea of redemption or purification for previous sins. And this has a wide appeal. You don't need to be a criminal to have this message resonate with you but they often specifically spoke about criminals so they posted videos where they talk about, ok, you're a drug dealer in London but why don't you actually come out here, prove that you're a real man and fight your head. So they would also play on other themes of not just redemption but power, status and respect. But it's a key example of how these groups, they basically reflect the environments in which they emerge from. And you can see this in various pockets to pockets, clusters and individuals but the case of the Woolwich boys in London, you had over a dozen guys all involved in street crime, petty crime. This is not organised as we would understand it to be. They all travelled to Syria and if they didn't die there they returned and were arrested. So this is something that we're seeing but it's important to distinguish this from the organised crime aspect. This is not what we're seeing. This is much more low level. This is social interactions, people that have grown up in certain environments and are connected to this criminal subculture. So finally Northern Ireland where we see arguably the densest and most institutionalised manifestation of this crime terror nexus in Europe. Many of the organisation that still exists, whether dissident Irish republicans or loyalists, could be classified today as what scholars call hybrid criminal terrorist organisation which means that it's not clear anymore whether they are principally motivated by a political agenda or whether crime has become an end in itself. And in fact in some cases I would argue it is difficult for these organisations themselves to say on what side they are. Paramilitary groups are part of the criminal ecosystem across the island but that's been true for many years, something that you know a lot more about than we do but there are two aspects that I want to highlight because I think they are relevant and have become even more relevant. The first issue is that of cross border smuggling. The fact that you have a border in Ireland, two jurisdictions creates opportunities for smuggling, that's been the case as long as the border has existed. And paramilitaries have been heavily involved in decades, that is also nothing new whether it is alcohol, pharmaceuticals, tobacco, other goods are being smuggled and profits are being made. It is estimated that this creates a loss to the Irish economy of 2.5 billion euros every year. To some extent it's a fact of life and there's only so much you can do about that. This has become more significant we believe because of Brexit. If the UK leaves the European Union, if regulatory divergence becomes more severe, if that is going to increase, that has the potential to increase incentives and therefore payoffs for organised crime. And it's really very simple, if you want it's the golden law of smuggling. If you have a product on one side of the border that is more expensive, more available, or is available on one side of the border and not on the other side of the border, there will eventually be someone who turns that into a profit. The greater the divergence is, the greater the profits, payoffs and incentives are. So if you have regulatory divergence in the case of pharmaceuticals for example, because the UK leaves the European Medicines Agency, then I can guarantee you today that there will be an increase in smuggling and this will benefit the main players in this game which are in the case of the Northern Irish border, dissident Irish Republican organisations. It's the most predictable thing that you can imagine and the answer to that is perhaps to close the border. But that's of course not politically desirable and as we know from our colleagues here in law enforcement and intelligence, it is also virtually impossible. So my personal view would be to stop Brexit. I don't know whether that is agreed in London but I do think that presents a problem and there is an organised crime aspect to that too and that needs to be watched out for. The second aspect are loyalist groups inside of Northern Ireland. And of course this is also true for some smaller Republican groups like the INLA and perhaps even smaller ones. But especially the loyalist groups have been central players in the drug trade in the North. That is no secret and that's been going on for a long time. There has been a process of that becoming almost institutionalised and entrenched and it's difficult to fight these organisations precisely because they are not just purely organised crime organisations but they also still within smaller and smaller constituency have a claim that is essentially political. They can still say in certain parts of West Belfast or East Belfast, ultimately we are your insurance policy, we are defenders of the community. You may not like the fact that we are dealing in drugs, but if you are being attacked by Republicans, we will come and defend you. And that makes it difficult for these groups to be eliminated because there is a small but still an existing level of community support for them. And this has become more problematic, I would argue, because some of these groups have also, what's still being organised or involved in organised crime, have successfully reinvented themselves as community groups, ex-prisoners groups who effectively get subsidies from the Northern Ireland Government. So you could actually argue that indirectly Northern Ireland Government is funding some of these groups and some of these activities. And that is a deeply problematic aspect. I do think that a blind eye has been turned for some time for the sake of not wanting to rock the boat, but I think in the long term the existence and the entrenchment of these actors in Northern Ireland is deeply problematic also to the peace process. So just to wrap up, we have a series of recommendations to start off, I suppose with the most boring academic one, which would be effective monitoring. So this is to standardise the definitions used and to publicise them so that accessible to all researchers. We also think that, not just in UK and Ireland, but all throughout Europe, radicalisation really needs to be rethought. And these old stereotypes of a religious fundamentalist that would not engage in crime or behaviours that contradict this sort of puritanical religious image just needs to be destroyed. Because many examples in Europe show that jihadists have engaged in crime, they've also taken, consumed drugs, which often goes against these sort of stereotypes. So we need to rethink what it means to be radicalised as well and understand that involvement in crime and criminal behaviour is not mutually exclusive from involvement in extremes. We also think we should have safer prisons, although this is easier to do, easier to say than do I suppose because in the UK, especially a programme of austerities, drastically cut funding for the prison cells. But this would involve training all staff, making sure that they're well equipped and not understaffed at all because we've generally found that prisons that are safer for criminals as a whole also do a better job against extremist groups. We also think that all financial streams need to be counted counter and terrorist financing is often being characterised as going against big international bank transfers and so on, whereas in reality you're often looking at small scale transactions and if it does involve crime it's on a very small petty level as well. We think that information should be shared and this is not just internationally between different agencies, we're talking about within government. Many examples of recent terrorist attacks with the benefit of hindsight is easy to say but often they could have been prevented or they could have been disrupted if different agencies within government had better shared information about the suspect. We also think that as Peter spoke about we should avoid regulatory divergence when it comes to issues of Brexit and relating to that to investigate the paramilitary crime that takes place in a much more systematic fashion. There was a great work of the independent monitoring commission and that ended six years ago and it would be great to see something like that on a much more systematic and continuing basis going forward. So the paper is available online at the moment, crimeteronexist.com and we also have established a Twitter account so please check that out at CrimeTerror. Thank you.