Guards Retreat in London, but Just a Little bit

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Guardsmen now stand guiding the gates of Clarence Property in London. Credit history Rex Attributes, by means of Associated Push Continue looking through the primary story Share This Web page Continue reading the primary story

With their scarlet tunics, black bearskin caps and impassive faces, the guards standing view outdoors Britain’s royal palaces are as much a tourist attraction as Large Ben and the Tower of London. But it is acquiring harder to see them.

Expanding fears of so-referred to as lone-wolf attacks in opposition to British targets, inspired by significantly-flung militant actions like the Islamic State, show up to have prompted the govt to pull the guards back again from exposed public spots to safer, significantly less noticeable areas.

Outdoors Clarence Residence, the London residence of Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall, the royal guards now stand at a sentry box powering the metallic gates, a go that attracted appreciable focus in British newspapers, which printed pictures of the new set up. At St. James’s Palace, the home of Princess Anne and her nieces the Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, the guards who utilized to stand sentry at the clock tower by the front gate have been moved to an internal courtyard.

At Horse Guards Parade, possibly the most renowned website in London for guard-watching, site visitors can nonetheless get pictures with two soldiers in entire costume uniform, but now numerous police officers are on duty there as well, standing guard over the guards, The Mail on Sunday described. The law enforcement officers have Heckler & Koch carbine rifles and Taser stun guns, in distinction to the royal guards, who have only unloaded rifles and ceremonial swords, the newspaper documented.

Buckingham Palace, the major royal home, moved its guards within the gates decades in the past, but that was done to elude pesky tourists. The palace on Monday declined to give details of any changes in guard protocols at royal residences, and so did the Ministry of Protection. “We don’t comment on stability preparations,” a spokeswoman for the ministry said by phone.

Even so, worries about people carrying out attacks on symbolic targets have grown much more powerful considering that October, when a Canadian soldier was killed whilst on ceremonial guard duty at the National War Memorial in Ottawa. Very last calendar year, a British soldier was killed on a London avenue by two men considered Islamic extremists. Hundreds of Britons have joined extremist teams like the Nusra Entrance or the Islamic State, which is waging armed strategies in Iraq and Syria and has frequently called on Western Muslims to start “lone-wolf attacks” in their residence international locations.

The British government in August raised its terrorism notify to the second-maximum degree and mentioned previous thirty day period that the place was experiencing the biggest terrorism threat in its background. Very last month, the commissioner of London’s police force, Bernard Hogan-Howe, stated the country’s security companies had foiled “four or five” terrorist plots this 12 months.

Previous guardsmen defended the relocation of the palace sentry posts.

“We have received to strike a harmony among not compromising our traditions and guarding our soldiers,” Terry O’Shea, a previous soldier in the Welsh Guard, was quoted as declaring in The Mail on Sunday. “You could argue that there must be a defiant stand, but how do you defend the troopers on parade in a vivid go well with, shiny boots and a furry hat?”

He ongoing, “The terrorists know that a guardsman is a greater-profile concentrate on than an common soldier, and they’re looking for publicity, some thing stunning, so the guards would go well with their agenda.”

Sally Leivesley, a law enforcement counterterrorism adviser, wrote in The Sunday Mirror that an assault on a soldier of the royal guard would be “a massively strong signal.”

“As a target,” she wrote, “it is exceptionally considerable for these groups to eliminate a British soldier in their residence region.”

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