India, July 11 -- UK Parliament's intelligence watchdog, Intelligence and Security Committee on Thursday said that the threat of physical attacks by Iran on the UK now matches to that of Russia.

"Whilst Iran's activity appears to be less strategic and on a smaller scale than Russia and China, Iran poses a wide-ranging, persistent and sophisticated threat to UK national security, which should not be underestimated," the UK watchdog said in a report.

According the the report by the watchdog, the number of intelligence officers in the IIS - in the tens of thousands - is also significantly smaller than the Russian and Chinese equivalents, which are in the low hundreds of thousands. Nevertheless, Iran still poses a significant and broad thre...