MI5 missed chance to stop Manchester bomber - report
BRITAIN: MI5 identified the Manchester bomber as one of a handful of would-be jihadists who required extra surveillance but did not act in time, it has emerged.
Britain’s Security Service also failed to investigate two ‘‘highly relevant’’ pieces of intelligence earlier this year that related to Salman Abedi, and might have been able to avert his atrocity, an official review released yesterday concluded.
Officials were due to meet on May 31 to discuss the threat posed by Abedi, nine days after he killed 22 people attending a pop concert at Manchester Arena in the worst terrorist attack in Britain in a decade.
The report by David Anderson, QC, into four terror attacks in London and Manchester between March and June, in which a total of 36 people were killed and 200 wounded, concluded that it was ‘‘conceivable the Manchester attack in particular might have been averted had the cards fallen differently’’.
In the case of Abedi, Anderson said, officials received intelligence on two separate occasions in the months prior to the attack ‘‘whose significance was not fully appreciated at the time’’. With the benefit of hindsight, it was ‘‘wrong’’ for
MI5 not to have opened an investigation, he said.
While MI5 has said this was unlikely to have changed the outcome, Anderson, a former independent reviewer of terrorism who was appointed by Home Secretary Amber Rudd to oversee the review, concluded that it was impossible to say.
Anderson assessed internal reviews by MI5 and police after the bombing in Manchester, car and knife attacks at London’s Westminster Bridge and London Bridge, and a vehicle attack in Finsbury Park, north London.
He revealed that terrorists involved in the three Islamist attacks between March and June were at some point on the radar of the authorities.
Khuram Butt, the ringleader of the London Bridge attack in June, in which eight people were murdered, was a ‘‘subject of interest’’ at the time and had been on authorities’ radar since mid-2015. However, it is the findings regarding Abedi, 22, that are the most damning for the security services.
He had twice been a so-called subject of interest to the security services - between January and July 2014, and then again in October 2015 - because of his associates, although evidence suggested he was a very low risk.
He was one of a circle of young extremists who fought in the Libyan civil war and had travelled to Libya shortly before the attack. He was known to the authorities, having visited an Islamic State extremist in prison, and used Youtube to research his attack.
In the Finsbury Park attack, also in June, a van was crashed into a group of worshippers outside a mosque. Darren Osborne, 48, from Cardiff, has been charged with murder.
Anderson’s report said there was no intelligence to suggest Osborne was going to commit the alleged attack. He recommended that the mechanisms applied to Islamist suspects be applied to farright extremists as well.
– The Times