US withdraws all bomber aircraft from UK airbase used during Iran war

AFP -- The United States confirmed that it had withdrawn all B-1 bombers from the British airbase of RAF Fairford, reportedly due to “new threats”, with Britain’s government insisting on Monday that the site is safe.

Police were called to the base in southwest England on Sept 27 after a local farmer reported a group of men with several vans engaged in “suspicious” activity.

The scare prompted a counter-terrorism probe and forced evacuations at 85 homes near the airbase, which was used by the US to launch strikes on Iran.

Investigators did not find any explosives in the vans, but “a quantity of petrol was recovered”, according to counter-terrorism police.

A statement from a Pentagon official on Sunday said, “We can acknowledge now that all US bombers that were deployed to RAF Fairford have redeployed to their home stations in the United States.”

The statement noted that “operational security precluded us from confirming the movement of our assets and forces in real-time”.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday expressed “confidence in the security of all of our bases”.

US facilities “theoretically could be threatened at any moment, and that’s why there’s so much security built around them”, Rubio said, adding that Washington had worked with London on the investigation and “they couldn’t be more cooperative”.

An unidentified US official told CNN that the bombers were moved after “an unspecified new threat”, with the source calling the latest threat a “real world incident”.

It was unusual to move the bombers back to their home stations instead of deploying them to another base in the region, the official reportedly said.

Two US officials told the New York Times that the bombers were moved after commanders received new threats about an alleged Iran-backed plot against the base.

One American official said the new information was part of the same threat warnings that surfaced three weeks ago, but the situation became urgent in the past 24 hours, NYT reported.

Asked whether the base was safe, UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s official spokesman said: “Yes.”

“We have tried and tested approaches to defend our bases around the country and throughout the world,” he told reporters.