Andy Burnham told the BBC on Wednesday that "there are strong indications that Iran played a part in what happened over the weekend at RAF Fairford." Britain's prime minister then closed the file. "It remains an ongoing, complex and serious police investigation," he said, and he could not "go into all of those details." On Sky News he put it as a belief: "We can now confirm our belief that Iran played a part." He offered no document, no intercept, no name.
The police who ran the case have shown what they found. The assistant commissioner who leads Britain's counter-terror police said Tuesday evening that forensic teams and military specialists took the three vans apart and "no improvised explosive devices were found. However, a quantity of petrol was recovered." The five men, British nationals in their twenties, went home on police bail Monday afternoon under "strict conditions." Nobody has been charged. Police can hold terror suspects for 14 days; they used less than two.
Marco Rubio got to Iran first. The secretary of state told Fox News on Monday night the plot "clearly involves the hands of a foreign actor," reached for "Iran, for example," and promised "repercussions." He named no evidence either. A reporter asked Trump in the Oval Office that afternoon whether Iran was behind it. Trump said it "might be," then: "I know the answer. I can be very specific, but I'd rather not say it."
Three men in three capitals point at Tehran, and not one has put a fact on the table; what they left is the order in which they spoke, and one line in Tuesday's police statement about who knew what before the arrests.
