The front pages of newspapers across Britain were plastered on Monday with the same grainy photograph, one showing five men, their faces blurred, being detained by police in the village of Whelford, England, who were investigating a possible terrorist plot.
By Monday, armed officers were monitoring roadblocks on the country roads leading to the sprawling military base that has been used since spring for U.S. operations related to the war in Iran.
More than a day after the police arrested the men, Whelford remained cordoned off after dozens of people had been evacuated from their homes. The men were released on bail on Monday afternoon, an unexpected development that injected confusion and raised questions about what was going on. The police said they were still investigating.
The village is one of three localities that butt up against R.A.F. Fairford, a British base in a quiet corner of southern England. They have been thrust onto the international stage and swirl with questions about what the men were doing and at whose instruction.
The villages of Whelford and Kempsford and the town of Fairford sit in a triangle around the base. Fairford’s residents have had a front-row seat to the U.S. bombers that have been flying in and out with renewed frequency since the start of the war with Iran this year, swooping low over the town.
Helen Cheese-Probert, whose thatched-roof home is a short walk from the base in Kempsford, said she was woken up Sunday morning by numerous calls from friends and family asking if she was all right.
“If you buy a house on a cricket pitch, you expect cricket balls,” said Ms. Cheese-Probert, 67, who was walking her beagle near the air base runway on Monday morning. “If you buy a house near an air base, you expect planes. But no one expected this.”
Ms. Cheese-Probert said she was used to seeing plane spotters crowding the roadways around the base but not armed police.
“When the war with Iran started, the number of plane spotters prohibited you from being able to walk along the pavement,” she said. In recent days, residents had begun noticing an uptick in security, she added.
Local Facebook pages and WhatsApp groups had been abuzz with concerns about men seen recently who residents thought looked suspicious.
In a closed Facebook group for Kempsford that a resident showed a reporter on the phone, one person posted on Sept. 16 that he had seen a man in a balaclava near the air base. At least three other residents offered similar accounts on that day. One noted seeing a masked man running through the village. It was unclear if they were speaking about the same person, and no one knew what the men were up to. Some of the security near the site on Monday were also wearing face masks.
Dom Morris, the Gloucestershire County councilor for Fairford, said he spent Sunday and Monday helping the dozens of people in Whelford who remained displaced.
About 85 households had to be evacuated quickly, and Mr. Morris said that the local authorities had worked to ensure that these people had places to stay and access to their medication and that there was aid for farmers who needed to reach animals left inside the security cordon.
On Monday evening, the residents were allowed to return to their home, but the cordon around the village remained, according to local police.
“To be really clear, Fairford, Whelford, Kempsford, we’re resilient,” he said, using a British swear word. “So there’s a bit of shock going on amongst villagers and people in the town. But there’s still people going about their lives, and that needs to continue.”
Mr. Morris said there had been some accounts from residents that a larger number of people had been seen near the base on Saturday night and early Sunday. Some residents feared that not all the people connected with the episode had been detained, he said.
Mr. Morris, who grew up in the area, said the base and the cooperation with the United States had long been a point of pride.
“Geopolitics aside, we get it, and it’s not unusual to have ebbs and flows,” Mr. Morris said. “But I think this is obviously quite different.”
The presence of American military aircraft at the Fairford base is not unusual; there is a long history of cooperation between the British and U.S. militaries at the base since it opened in preparation for D-Day in 1944. Because of the length of its runway, the base is one of only a few European airfields that can be used by heavy U.S. bombers.
In the pubs and cafes of other towns and villages near the base on Monday, road closures rather than broader security concerns seemed to dominate the conversation.
At St Mary’s, a picturesque medieval church perched at the center of Fairford, Liz Jefferies was clearing weeds from her husband’s grave under the early autumn sun.
Ms. Jefferies, 76, has lived in Fairford since 1971. In the months since the United States began using the base for its war against Iran, she said there had been a notable uptick in large bombers overhead.
“We don’t normally get much trouble around here, so it’s a bit of a surprise,” Ms. Jefferies said of the arrests. “It’s really not nice.”
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