A high-ranking British police official, who served during Meghan Markle's residency in the United Kingdom, has disclosed the distressing reality of her encountering death threats from far-right extremists.
Following their departure from the British royal family, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry engaged in a legal battle with the British government to retain their official security detail. Recent revelations have underscored that their apprehensions regarding the loss of this protection were entirely justified.
In an interview with the British network Channel 4, Neil Basu, the former head of the anti-terrorism division within the British police, affirmed that Meghan Markle endured "repugnant and unequivocally real" death threats from racially motivated groups while she was a member of the British royal family.
Basu further revealed that credible threats from far-right extremists targeting the Duke and Duchess of Sussex had to be actively investigated. "We dedicated teams to scrutinize these threats, resulting in the prosecution of individuals responsible," he stated.
These revelations shed light on the concerns Prince Harry had expressed publicly on multiple occasions about the potential dangers facing his family. During his tenure as a British royal, he even cryptically remarked, "If someone else knew what I knew..."—statements that now carry a deeper significance.
Given these revelations, Prince Harry's determination to preserve his security detail in the United Kingdom, following its removal by the government when he and Meghan relinquished their royal titles and relocated to the United States, becomes more comprehensible. At the time, the Duke of Sussex even proposed financing his own security while in the UK, but the Ministry of the Interior declined his offer.
"Prince Harry inherited a lifelong security risk due to his birthright. He remains sixth in line to the throne, having served two tours of combat duty in Afghanistan, and in recent years, his family has been targeted by well-documented neo-Nazi and extremist threats. Despite the shifts in his royal role, his profile as a member of the Royal Family remains intact, and so do the threats against him and his family," explained his legal team in a statement last February. In that statement, they also expressed the dukes' readiness to resort to legal action to safeguard their security—a position now corroborated by the former head of the British police's anti-terrorism division.
