'What we are seeing is nothing short of negligence and contempt for the British public,' says Ben Leo

Walid Saadaoui, 38, and Amar Hussein, 52, wanted to replicate the 2015 Paris terror attacks in revenge for Israeli assaults on Gaza.

They planned a suicide attack designed to kill as many members of the Jewish community as possible, hoping to become martyrs.

They bought assault rifles, handguns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Nothing was off limits.

They carried out reconnaissance at Jewish shops and synagogues and, chillingly, schools and nurseries.

They were only stopped when intelligence services uncovered the plot and deployed an undercover officer posed as someone willing to help them.

Walid Saadaoui was a former hotel entertainer originally from Tunisia, who married an Englishwoman and moved to Britain in 2012.

His accomplice was a former Iraqi soldier who claimed to be from Kuwait.

The CPS said he had military training and was a known follower of Isis. It is not reported when or how he arrived in the UK.

Both men were fuelled by a sick desire to carry out a repeat of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. Sardar lurked around Jewish neighbourhoods in Manchester, scouting out schools, nurseries and shops as he planned his massacre.

He told the undercover officer: “My blood is boiling. We’re going to carry out the operation in August. Brothers from inside Islamic State will help us.”

By May 2024, after months of reconnaissance, they both believed they were about to receive a huge cache of weapons and ammunition outside a hotel in Bolton.

They were arrested red-handed. Unknown to them, the guns had been deactivated. What would have been one of the worst terrorist attacks in British history was foiled.

Let’s be clear about what is happening in Britain today and has been happening for decades.

Islamism is a cancer that has been allowed to spread unchecked, enabled by an open-border policy that even the Trump administration has described as suicidal empathy. There are thousands more jihadists just like these men operating in Britain right now.

I know this because people working in counter-terror and security services have told me about numerous foiled plots that will never reach the public domain, details that would shock you to the core.

This was a near miss. There have been many others. And there have also been attacks that slipped through the net: Lee Rigby, Manchester Arena, London Bridge in 2017, I was there, London Bridge again in 2019, Westminster Bridge, the Liverpool hospital bombing, and just this year, the Manchester synagogue attack.

That is just Britain.

Extraordinary Security Minister Tom Tugendhat posted earlier: “People whose names will never be known found the information that stops these murderers. The heroism of MI5 is often rightly unnoticed.

“We need to be honest about the threat. Islamist ideas inspired by Muslim Brotherhood ideology are a threat to everyone in the UK. Jews are just the first in line.”

He is right. Our counter-terror and security services are heroes, and I thank them.

But why not make their lives easier by stopping these extremists entering the UK in the first place?

On the face of it, these two men were living here legally. But there have also been foiled terror plots involving people who arrived in this country by small boat. More than 40,000 have entered this year alone.

It is insane.

While the small boats invasion has not been declared a national emergency, it should be. What we are seeing is nothing short of negligence and contempt for the British public.

Ask yourself tonight: how many more murders, rapes and slaughters must we endure before politicians finally do their most basic job, protecting this land and its people?

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