A 66-year-old woman has been arrested on suspicion of murder after a 69-year-old was found fatally stabbed in her home in north London.

Emergency services were called to a report of an unresponsive woman at a property in Mornington Place, Camden at 18:00 BST on Friday, 13 June.

The victim, named by police as Jennifer Abbott, was found by her niece and neighbours. The neighbour said she had been left with tape across her mouth.

On Wednesday, the Metropolitan Police said a missing Rolex watch may be linked to Ms Abbott’s death.

Met detectives added that they were keeping an open mind about the possible motive for the stabbing and appealed for information about the watch which they believed was missing from Ms Abbot’s address.

The watch has a distinctive diamond-encrusted face.

The suspect remains in police custody after being arrested on Wednesday, the force added.

The 69-year-old, also known as Sarah Steinberg, was last seen walking her pet corgi in Camden on 10 June, before she was found fatally injured three days later.

A post-mortem examination gave the cause of death as sharp force trauma.

The victim’s family have been informed and are being supported by specialist officers.

Det Insp Barry Hart, from Homicide Command, Specialist Crime North, said: “This arrest marks a significant step forward.

“There are several lines of enquiry ongoing, and we are working hard to establish the exact circumstances of this incident.

“Locals can expect to see an increased police presence in the area while we conduct our enquiries.”

One neighbour, who did not want to be named, told the BBC Ms Abbott had recently confided to friends she was fearful living at her flat because of crime in the area.

“Jenny was having a coffee with [her neighbour] only last week, and was crying in the cafe saying, saying ‘I’m scared to go to sleep at night because of all the drug-taking activity that goes on’.”

Ms Abbott had told her neighbour that drug abusers had gained access to her block of flats and were using her hallway to use drugs.

The neighbour said: “I remember Jenny saying to me that she came out one day and they’re all standing in front of her door, cooking up their stuff, making the whole area a shooting gallery.

“She told me she came out and asked could she get by and the answer came ‘wait a minute, we’re not finished’.”

Israeli jets have bombed a nuclear reactor under construction in central Iran during a wave of air strikes on the seventh day of the conflict between the two countries.

The Israeli military said it targeted the Arak heavy water reactor’s core seal to stop it being used for “nuclear weapons development”.

The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed the reactor was hit and that it contained no nuclear material.

Spent fuel from heavy water reactors contains plutonium suitable for a nuclear bomb.

Iran – which says its nuclear programme is entirely peaceful – agreed under a 2015 deal with world powers to redesign and rebuild Arak so it could not produce weapons-grade plutonium.

The following year, the IAEA said Iran had removed Arak’s calandria, or reactor core, and rendered it “inoperable”.

The global nuclear watchdog’s latest quarterly report from late May said minor civil construction work was ongoing at the reactor, and that Iran expected it to be commissioned this year and to start operating in 2026.

The Israeli military said Iran’s government had “deliberately ordered [workers] not to complete the conversion… in order to exert pressure on the West”.

“The strike targeted the component intended for plutonium production, in order to prevent the reactor from being restored and used for nuclear weapons development,” it added.

Black-and-white aerial footage of the attack released by the military appeared to show a bomb hitting the domed roof of the reactor building and several large explosions from Arak, which about 250km (155 miles) south-west of Tehran and is also known as Khondab.

Daytime video broadcast by Iranian state TV showed two large plumes of white smoke rising from the facility. It also cited Iranian officials as saying that the site had been “secured in advance” and that there was “no contamination resulting from the attack”.

Satellite imagery showed a large hole in the reactor building’s roof.

Also visible were what analysts identified as destroyed distillation towers belonging to the adjacent heavy water production plant.

The IAEA initially reported that damage to the heavy water plant was not visible. But the agency later said it had assessed that key buildings at the facility were damaged, including the distillation unit.

The Israeli military also announced on Thursday that its fighter jets had struck a “nuclear weapons development site” at Natanz.

It is the location of Iran’s main plant producing enriched uranium, which is used to make reactor fuel for power stations but, if further enriched, can be used in nuclear weapons.

The first wave of Israeli strikes last Friday destroyed the above-ground part of Natanz’s Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant (PFEP), where cascades of centrifuges were enriching uranium, as well as electricity infrastructure at the site. The IAEA also found indications of direct impacts on the underground enrichment halls.

Rafael Grossi, the IAEA director general, told the BBC on Monday that the sudden loss of power at the underground enrichment halls was likely to have severely damaged, if not destroyed, the centrifuges operating there.

Four buildings were destroyed in a separate attack on Friday on the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Centre, he said. But very little, if any, damage was visible at Iran’s underground enrichment plant at Fordo, he added.

President Donald Trump is said to be weighing up whether the US should participate in a strike on Fordo because it is the only country with a conventional bomb large enough to destroy it. Sources told the BBC’s US partner CBS News that his mindset was that disabling the facility was necessary.

In 2018, Trump abandoned the nuclear deal with Iran, saying it did too little to stop its pathway to a bomb, and reinstated US sanctions that crippled the Iranian economy.

Iran retaliated by increasingly breaching the restrictions – particularly those relating to the production of enriched uranium.

In its quarterly report, the IAEA expressed concern that Iran had amassed enough uranium enriched up to 60% purity – a short, technical step away from weapons grade, or 90% – to potentially make nine nuclear bombs.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said on Friday that it was targeting the Iranian nuclear programme because “if not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time”. He did not provide any evidence.

Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said on Sunday that Israel had “crossed a new red line in international law” by attacking nuclear sites. He also insisted that Iran’s doctrine was “rooted in our belief in the prohibition and illegitimacy of nuclear weapons”.

Israel is widely believed to have nuclear weapons, although it neither confirms nor denies this.

The Israeli air strikes have also destroyed Iranian military facilities and weapons, and killed senior military commanders and nuclear scientists.

Iran’s health ministry said on Sunday that at least 224 people had been killed, but a human rights group put the unofficial death toll at 639 on Thursday.

Iran has launched hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel in response to the air strikes that have killed at least 24 people, according to the prime minister’s office.

Long before India gained independence, one defiant voice inside the British Empire dared to call out a colonial massacre – and paid a price for it.

Sir Chettur Sankaran Nair, a lawyer, was one of the few Indians to be appointed to top government posts when the British ruled the country.

In 1919, he resigned from the Viceroy’s Council after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in the northern Indian city of Amritsar in Punjab, in which hundreds of civilians attending a public meeting were shot dead by British troops. On the 100th anniversary of the massacre, then UK Prime Minister Theresa May described the tragedy as a “shameful scar” on Britain’s history in India.

Nair’s criticism of Punjab’s then Lieutenant Governor, Michael O’Dwyer, led to a libel case against him, which helped spotlight the massacre and the actions of British officials.

In a biography of Nair, KPS Menon, independent India’s first foreign secretary, described him as “a very controversial figure of his time”.

Nair was known for his independent views and distaste for extremist politics, and spoke critically of colonial rule and even of Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian independence hero who is now regarded as the father of the nation.

Menon, who married Nair’s daughter Saraswathy, wrote: “Only [Nair] could have insulted the all powerful British Viceroy on his face and opposed Mahatma Gandhi openly.”

Nair was not a familiar name in India in recent decades, but earlier this year, a Bollywood film based on the court case, Kesari Chapter 2- starring superstar Akshay Kumar – helped bring attention to his life.

Nair was born in 1857 into a wealthy family in what is now Palakkad district in Kerala state. He studied at the Presidency College in Madras, acquiring a bachelor’s degree before studying law and beginning his career as an apprentice with a Madras High Court judge.

In 1887, he joined the social reform movement in the Madras presidency. Throughout his career, he fought to reform Hindu laws of the time on marriage and women’s rights and to abolish the caste system.

For some years, he was a delegate to the Indian National Congress and presided over its 1897 session in Amraoti (Amravati). In his address, he held the British-run government “morally responsible for the extreme poverty of the masses”, saying the annual famines “claimed more victims and created more distress than under any civilised government anywhere else in the world”.

He was appointed public prosecutor in 1899 and writes in his autobiography about advising the government on seditious articles in newspapers, including those by his close friend G Subramania Iyer, the first editor of The Hindu newspaper. “On many occasions… I was able to persuade them not to take any step against him.”

He became a high court judge in 1908 and was knighted four years later.

Nair moved to Delhi in 1915 when he was appointed a member of the Viceroy’s Council, only the third Indian to hold the position.

He was a fierce proponent of India’s right to govern itself and pushed for constitutional reforms during his time on the council. Through 1918 and 1919, his dissent and negotiations with Edwin Montagu, then secretary of state for India, helped expand provisions of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms which laid out how India would gradually achieve self-governance.

Montagu wrote in his diary that he had been warned “that it was absolutely necessary to get him on my side, for Sankaran Nair wielded more influence than any other Indian”.

A pivotal moment in Nair’s career as a statesman was the massacre in Jallianwala Bagh, when hundreds of unarmed Indians were shot dead in a public garden on the day of the Baisakhi festival. Official estimates said nearly 400 people were killed and more than 1,500 wounded by the soldiers, who fired under the orders of Brigadier General REH Dyer. Indian sources put the death toll closer to 1,000.

Nair writes in his 1922 book Gandhi and Anarchy about following the events in Punjab with increasing concern. The shooting at Jallianwala Bagh was part of a larger crackdown in the province, where martial law had been introduced – the region was cut off from the rest of the country and no newspapers were allowed into it.

“If to govern the country, it is necessary that innocent persons should be slaughtered at Jallianwala Bagh and that any Civilian Officer may, at any time, call in the military and the two together may butcher the people as at Jallianwala Bagh, the country is not worth living in,” he wrote.

A month later, he resigned from the council and left for Britain, where he hoped to rouse public opinion on the massacre.

In his memoir, Nair writes of speaking to the editor of The Westminster Gazette which soon published an article called the Amritsar Massacre. Other papers including The Times also followed suit.

“Worse things had happened under British rule, but I am glad I was able to obtain publicity for this one at least,” Nair wrote.

Nair’s book Gandhi and Anarchy drew the ire of several Indian nationalists of the time after he criticised Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement, calling it a “weapon to be used when constitutional methods have failed to achieve our purpose”.

But it was the few passages condemning Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, that became the basis for the libel suit against him in 1924.

Nair accused O’Dwyer of terrorism, holding him responsible for the atrocities committed by the civil government before the imposition of martial law.

A five-week trial in the Court of King’s Bench in London ruled 11:1 in favour of O’Dwyer, awarding damages of £500 and £7,000 in costs to him.

O’Dwyer offered to forgo this for an apology but Nair refused and paid instead.

Reports of the depositions in the hearing were published daily in The Times. Nair’s family says despite losing, the case achieved his purpose of having the atrocities brought to public attention.

Nair’s great-grandson Raghu Palat, who co-wrote the book The Case That Shook the Empire, with his wife Pushpa, says the case helped spark “an uproar for the freedom movement”.

It also showed that “there was no point in having a dominion status under the empire when the British cannot be expected to deal with their subjects fairly”, adds Pushpa.

Even Gandhi referred to the case several times, writing once that Nair had showed pluck in fighting without hope of victory, historian PC Roy Chaudhury later pointed out.

After losing the case, Nair continued with his career in India. He was chairman of the Indian Committee of the Simon Commission, which reviewed the working of constitutional reforms in India in 1928.

He died in 1934 at the age of 77.

Through his career, Menon notes, Nair “bent all his thoughts and energies on the emancipation of his country from the bondage of foreign domination and native custom. In this task, he achieved as much success as any man, wedded to constitutional methods”.

Is this, some will be wondering, 2003 all over again?

In 2003 Britain joined the US in a highly controversial military campaign against Iraq in a quest to rid it of its supposed arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction”. These turned out to have all been destroyed years previously.

As America’s closest but junior ally, Britain is almost certain to be affected in some way by what happens now in the Middle East. If Donald Trump decides to commit US forces to help Israel eliminate Iran’s nuclear programme then what role will the UK be asked to play?

First off, Britain is very far from being a central player in this fight between Israel and Iran.

The UK, along with other G7 allies, has called for de-escalation, but Israel is unlikely to be listening.

This is not just because relations between Britain and Israel have recently soured after the UK joined other Western nations in sanctioning two Israeli cabinet ministers for inciting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.

It is also because Israel had clearly decided that now was a window of opportunity to act militarily against Iran’s suspect nuclear programme and that the time for talking was over. (In an apparent snub to the UK, Israel reportedly did not inform it in advance of its attack on Iran, considering it “not a reliable partner”.)

But the UK still has a diplomatic role to play, together with its European allies who helped draft the 2015 JCPOA Iran nuclear deal that introduced intrusive UN inspections of Iran’s facilities in exchange for sanctions relief, until Donald Trump pulled the US out of the deal in 2018.

David Lammy, the foreign secretary, is in Washington meeting his US counterpart, and he will be heading to Geneva, Switzerland, on Friday to join his French, German and EU counterparts in talks with Iran.

The UK also has military and strategic assets in the Middle East and Indian Ocean.

Here’s how these could be involved.

This tiny, tropical Indian Ocean island base, jointly operated by the UK and US and now leased from nearby Mauritius, has a strategic significance out of all proportion to its size.

At 2,300 miles (3,700km) from Iran, it is a potential staging base for the USAF B2 Spirit heavy bombers.

These are the only aircraft in the world configured to carry the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bomb. This 30,000lb (13.6 tonne) monster is sometimes referred to as a “bunker-buster” but that’s an under-estimate. Retired US Army General Petraeus referred to it this week as “a mountain-buster”. It is thought to be the only weapon powerful enough to penetrate deep underground at Iran’s suspect nuclear enrichment facility at Fordo.

If the US were to use Diego Garcia it would need permission from the UK. The Attorney General, Richard Hermer, is reported to have advised the UK government that any UK military involvement needs to be purely defensive in nature to remain within the law.

The B2 bombers have a range of nearly 7,000 miles, roughly the distance from their airbase in Missouri to Iran, and with inflight refuelling the US could, if it chose, bomb Fordo without using Diego Garcia.

The UK has two major strategic assets on this Mediterranean island.

One is RAF Akrotiri, currently home to a reinforced presence of RAF Typhoon jets. The other is the secretive Signals intelligence listening station on a mountain top at Ayios Nikolaos, known as “Ayia Nik”, and part of Britain’s Sovereign Base Area on Cyprus.

The British Army has also long used Cyprus as a base for its “spearhead battalion”, a rapid deployment force available for contingencies in the Middle East.

The RAF’s Typhoons are already engaged in Operation Shader, monitoring and occasionally bombing the Islamic State group (IS) and al-Qaeda bases in Syria and Iraq.

Last year, during a brief conflict between Israel and Iran, UK warplanes were reported to have helped shoot down incoming Iranian drones heading for Israel. But in this conflict an Israeli spokesperson told the BBC that no UK assistance has been sought or offered in doing the same thing.

The Royal Navy has had a small but vital role to play in keeping the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz free from sea mines.

This dates back to the 1980-88 Iran Iraq tanker war, where mines were deployed and the UK activated its “Armilla Patrol”. Royal Navy minesweepers were based in Bahrain, an asset much appreciated by the adjacent US Navy’s 5th Fleet HQ which surprisingly, has been weak on mine counter measures.

However, the UK’s vessels have been nearing the end of their working lives and the Royal Navy presence has been gradually reduced. This has contributed to the depressing assessment that should Iran decide to choke off the Strait of Hormuz, through which flows 20-30% of the world’s oil supplies, its effect would be considerable.

The Ministry of Defence says that one Royal Navy minesweeper, HMS Middleton, is now in the Gulf. “Royal Navy vessels in the Gulf are currently at sea”, it adds, “and have not been retasked to undertake combat operations”.

There is also a small, 100-strong UK military presence in Iraq and a port facility at Duqm in Oman.

Iran has signalled on several occasions that any nation that attacks it, or which it judges to have helped enable an attack, will be retaliated against, sometimes referred to as “blowback”.

Top of the target list would be the US bases up and down the region, as well as its naval ships at sea.

But in the event that the UK were to authorise the USAF to use its base at Diego Garcia for an attack on say, the Iranian nuclear facility at Fordo, then that retaliation would almost certainly include the UK.

In practice, this could include ballistic missiles fired at RAF Akrotiri but here in Britain the Security Service, MI5, will also be on the alert for any hostile acts by Iran that could include sabotage and arson carried out by criminal gangs.