Sky reports:

The eight people arrested by terror police in Birmingham were allegedly planning an Iraq-style kidnapping and beheading, Sky News has learned.

Sky’s Crime Correspondent Martin Brunt says the plot involved randomly snatching an individual off the streets.

The kidnappers then intended to release a video of the hostage being tortured and beheaded.

The suspects were detained under the Terrorism Act after a six-month surveillance operation involving officers from two forces…

Given the long term police investigation, presumably they have already eliminated the possibility of such a plot being a Brummie reaction to Manchester’s yesterday having been awarded the “supercasino“. That being the case, this sort of thing certainly rates as new. But it does make some sense, given the unreliability of suicide bombing.

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UPDATE: The Press Association:

…Sources said a target for the alleged plot had already been identified.

He was a young Muslim soldier in the British army who had served in Afghanistan…

Invariably over this, “Iraq” is going to be mentioned in the context of British Muslims’ alienation over the UK’s presence there. However, it is worth bearing in mind when we hear that familiar drumbeat once again that almost all British Muslims are Sunnis (and overwhelmingly from the Indian subcontinent), but almost none are Iraqi Shias. Coincidentally, as we were reminded by Fouad Ajami in yesterday’s WSJ:

…The Sunni Arabs in Iraq and beyond have never accepted the diversity of that land. The “Arabism” of the place was synonymous with their own primacy. Now a binational state in all but name (Arab and Kurdish) has come into being in Iraq, and the Shia underclass have stepped forth and staked a claim commensurate with the weight of their numbers. The Sunni Arabs have recoiled from this change in their fortunes. They have all but “Persianized” the Shia of Iraq, branded them as a fifth column of the state next door. Contemporary Islamism has sharpened this feud, for to the Sunni Islamists the Shia are heretics at odds with the forbidding strictures of the Islamists’ fanatical variant of the faith…