President Trump said he was "surprised" that British police released on bail the five men arrested over a suspected bomb plot near RAF Fairford, and said the UK should not have freed them. "We know everything about them. We would not have released them," Trump told reporters. Asked whether the case was connected to Iran, he said it "might be," a link Iran's embassy in London said it "categorically rejects and strongly condemns."

The five men, all British nationals from London aged 23 to 25, were released Monday, a day after armed police arrested them in Whelford, near the Gloucestershire base that has hosted US B-1 and B-52 bomber operations against Iran since February. Tests on the materials found in the three vans stopped near the base showed no viable explosives. They remain under investigation and face strict conditions on their movements and contact with others, and police are pursuing multiple lines of inquiry, including that they acted, knowingly or unknowingly, at the behest of a foreign state.

Trump said Sunday the suspects had been under view "for a long time," though the arrests followed a farmer's late-night report of three suspicious vans near the base. BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner said he did not understand the claim, asking how the men had been "allowed to wander round Gloucestershire putting on masks and driving vans allegedly with explosives in them." US Ambassador to NATO Whitaker said Washington is working closely with the UK on the arrested men.