The same paper has this:
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/17/terror-or-mental-illness-dividing-britains-judges/
"After each attack, specialist officers and the intelligence agenciess_ only have days to decide whether to publicly declare an act of violence a terror attack. The decision is often fraught with difficulties – not least the complexity of trying to understand a suspect’s state of mind in the hours after an attack, without the hard evidence that may later emerge. Police officers, intelligence agencies and judges have strongly disagreed over how some individual attacks should be classified.
The race to decide
Jacques says that with the vast majority of attacks in the UK now launched by lone actors with no formal links to terrorist groups or networks, those decisions are becoming increasingly complex.
“If you wind the clock back to when terrorism was structured and had groups meeting planning and plotting, it was more straightforward to determine,” he says.
“But when it’s somebody you don’t know and an act has happened that looks like it might be terrorism, answering that question really early doors is more difficult.”
In Britain, terrorism has gradually movedd_ away from structured groups like the IRA and al-Qaeda who once directed attacks through formal networks, to individuals acting on personal and frequently chaotic combinations of grievance and inspiration.
Following Isis’ call for global attacks by its followers without seeking permission in 2014, the group’s model of indiscriminate bomb, knife and vehicle rampages has been picked up by a far wider pool of terrorists.
“When you attach yourself to a cause like Isis, then there’s a model, and when someone then copies that well-established model, it’s quite easy to say ‘that is terrorism’,” says Jonathan Hall, the UK’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation.
“I think the difficulty comes when people haven’t attached themselves to a particular, well-known cause, or if they’ve got lots of different causes, any one of which could appear to be the driver towards violence.”
Jacques says that when potential terror attacks are committed by people who are unknown to the security services, officers have to rapidly analyse a vast amount of evidence, including witness accounts, police interviews with the perpetrator, examination of their electronic devices and their personal background to try to ascertain if they have an ideological motivation.
“It’s such a murky world now,” Jacques says. “You think: ‘How can you define that specifically? Is it an ideological cause? Is it personal grievance, is it mental health, is it a combination of all three?’ Which is another reason why declaration early is less than straightforward.”
Reaching a decision and publicly declaring it is a race against time. Normally, police can only hold suspects for 24 hours without charge, although they can apply to a court to extend the period to four days.
But if the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS))_ decides that it has enough evidence to charge an attacker with murder or attempted murder before counter-terror police have established their motivation, a public declaration will not be made out of fear of influencing jurors at a future trial."