UK allocates extra £100 million to ’monitor’ ISIL militants

An extra £100 million (about USD 150 million) has been allocated to security services in the UK to monitor suspected militants returning home from Syria and Iraq, a senior British official says.

“Within the last few weeks we have put extra money – over £100mn – into specifically monitoring people who are going to conflicts in Syria and Iraq” and then return to the UK, British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne told the state-run BBC on Friday.

“We have put a huge amount of planning and effort, from the police, from the security services, from the government, into anticipating what might happen,” Osborne added.

He also warned of the rising gap between the “increasingly challenging threat” of terrorist attacks and the “decreasing availability of capabilities” to deal with them.

His remarks came following a string of terrorist assaults in France, beginning with a raid on the Paris office of the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly on Wednesday.

Eight journalists, two police officers, a maintenance worker and a visitor were killed in the attack.

On Friday, two brothers, Said and Cherif Kouachi, suspected of slaughtering the 12 people on Wednesday, were killed after being cornered at a printing workshop with a hostage in the town of Dammartin-en-Goele, northeast of Paris. The two had earlier released the hostage.

Also on Friday, police ended a second hostage-taking in a supermarket in the eastern Porte de Vincennes area of Paris, killing one armed hostage-taker, Amedy Coulibaly, who was a suspect in the Thursday killing of a policewoman in southern Paris. Officials say that four hostages were also killed during the raid.

It has still not been verified if Coulibaly had an accomplice during the hostage taking or acted alone. Before the incident police issued an appeal saying they were searching for Coulibaly and a 26-year-old woman named Hayat Boumeddiene in relation to the policewoman’s killing. Boumeddiene’s whereabouts are still unknown.

The ISIL Takfiri group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, threatening to target the United States and Britain next.