The air base, which has been on high alert for the past few days, hosts the United States Air Force personnel and was used in recent months to launch operations against Iran during the war in the Middle East. Last July, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards warned Britain not to allow American bombers to take off from the base. However, the British government authorized American planes stationed at Fairford to carry out defensive strikes against Iranian sites that had hit ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
The Guardian mentioned that in the first it was revealed that a farmer who was driving home from a party around 1 am on Sunday noticed the men and vans and called 999, but on Tuesday it turned out that one of the five men arrested near the base called the police to report the incident.
The suspects were arrested first on charges of explosives and then on charges of preparing acts of terrorism. The decision on Monday to release the men on bail was made after an examination of what was found in the vehicles, and searches of addresses linked to them across London, in each of which no evidence of a working device was found. Counter-terrorism police are leading the investigation, which is trying to find out why the five men, all British nationals from London, were in the Gloucestershire countryside near a sensitive site in the middle of the night.
The vans were marked with the logo of a legitimate fuel trucking company, which later denied ownership of the vehicles. The Iranian embassy in London announced that it “strongly rejects and defends the latest baseless and malicious speculations” about Iran’s involvement. Eighty-five households were forced to move into a leisure center on Sunday as the bomb squad and counter-terrorism police raided Walford. Some evacuated residents were able to stay with families, around 60 people received support from a Cotswold County Council rest center in Cirencester, and 28 people were accommodated in hotels.