A farmer who claims to have alerted the police to a suspected terrorist bomb plot at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire has said she has had “no follow-up at all” from the authorities.
The woman told reporters on Monday that she did not see herself as a hero for having reported vans blocking a road near the base while on her way back from a party.
Five men from London were arrested in the village of Whelford, near to RAF Fairford, on Sunday on suspicion of explosives and terrorism offences.
The village remained shut off on Monday afternoon, with people evacuated from their homes dispersed to family, friends, hotels and a leisure centre.
The farmer, in her ۵۰s, said she had been travelling home with her husband and a “young lad” who works for them when she spotted the vehicles parked in a “really strange formation”.
She said: “You couldn’t drive between them on the road, and you also couldn’t drive up the farm drive, and I think this has been one of the funny things that people are saying: ‘How could you notice?’ But when you live in Whelford, you notice everything. We all know what cars each other drive, we know who we are, we know the people that cycle through regularly.”
She said one of the vans had some “strange sign writing on it” and she initially believed it belonged to undercover police.
She said: “We had a bit of a look at the vans, established there was no one in there, tried to phone the number on the side, just in case we could get it moved so we could drive down to the farmyard, and the number didn’t work.”
After dropping off their employee, the farmer and her husband turned around and drove back the way they had come.
“We suddenly saw a large group of men,” she said. “They were panicking … I suppose they were panicking because anyone saw them, but our vehicle is quite similar to the patrol vehicles that they use, and we had our lights on main beam.
“I think we sort of dazzled them, and they started to run, and some of them ran straight ahead across the road into the field, and some turned and started going down towards Kempsford, which is our next village.”
Despite five men having been arrested, the farmer said there were “definitely more than five” and estimated she saw between eight and ۱۰ people with their faces covered and wearing “slim-fitting clothes”. Authorities have previously said the incident was contained.
The farmer said she tried to call the MoD police, but the phone “just rang and rang and rang and no one answered”, before she phoned ۱۰۱ and was put on hold. She then phoned ۹۹۹ and messaged the village WhatsApp group to alert people to the unusual activity.
“Literally within five minutes of that, everything sort of kicked off and armed police arrived – the guys were arrested,” she said. “The helicopter was up searching, probably for a couple of hours, and there was a lot of shouting.”
She added: “The strange thing is, there was no kind of follow-up. The police didn’t ring me – they had all my details, they didn’t phone me back, and nobody told anyone in the village what was going on apart from me.
“It wasn’t until probably half six in the morning when they suddenly decide to evacuate people. Meanwhile, those vans were right in the middle of the village, next to everyone’s houses and no one did anything.”
Responding to her account, the defence secretary, Wes Streeting, said earlier on Monday that she had only “a partial picture” of the situation.
The farmer in turn told reporters: “I know it’s been said by some of the higher-ups today that I didn’t have the full picture, but the picture I had was three extremely unusual vehicles parked in the middle of our village and a group of unknown men running around.”
