Ben Cawthra/Sipa USAA special U.K. security team is currently monitoring up to 220 people identified as a potential threat to Kate Middleton, who is pregnant with her and Prince William's second child, a report says.
The U.K. newspaper The Mirror cited the figures from the Fixated Threat Assessment Centre on Thursday, about a month before the Duchess of Cambridge is due to give birth. The FTAC and palace officials have not commented.
The group is a joint police and mental health unit that is part of the London Metropolitan Police Department's Royalty Protection command that investigates and monitors people believed to be "fixated on protected persons and sites." Officers and psychiatric nurses are carrying out "welfare and medication checks" on what they believe to be the most "high risk" individuals and the FTAC investigating online sources to try to identity potential threats, The Mirror reported.
The outlet quoted Dai Davies, a retired Metropolitan Police official who had served as the Head of Royal Protection for years, as saying that life events such as births and marriages "give rise to a greater likelihood of an incident." Security was beefed up in the months leading to the Royal Wedding of Kate and William on April 29, 2011.
Three days before the event, Time magazine had reported that 40 percent of the "most persistent stalkers" in the U.K. are "fixated on members of the royal family, who together receive around 10,000 correspondences from them each year."
"Prevention is one of the key areas," Davies told The Mirror. "Because in about 70 percent of cases where there have been attacks, the fixated person has indicated before the incident that they are going to do something."