Manchester bomb could have been avoided

SPIES missed crucial opportunities to thwart the Manchester terror attack which killed 22 people, an official report has found.

Counter-terrorism officials might have prevented suicide bomber Salman Abedi blowing himself up at a concert if intelligence had been given greater priority.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd told the Commons that the jihadist atrocity on May 22 could have been avoided ‘had the cards fallen differently’.

It was also revealed that the ringleader of the Islamist terror gang which brought bloodshed to central London on June 3 was being investigated by MI5 and police for his extremist views. Khuram Butt – one of three men who slaughtered eight people in a van and knife rampage – had been on the authorities’ radar for two years. The shocking findings were contained in a report by David Anderson QC, a former terrorism law reviewer asked by the Home Secretary to audit internal MI5 and police reviews into four incidents between March and June.

The security services faced serious questions following the strikes at Westminster Bridge, Manchester, London Bridge and Finsbury Park, which together killed 36 people and wounded 200. Three of the six terrorists were known to MI5, the report revealed. Khalid Masood, who attacked Westminster, and Abedi were former ‘subjects of interest’ – but no longer under active investigation.

Abedi, 22, detonated a home-made suicide bomb outside an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena. He had first become an MI5 ‘subject of interest’ in 2014, but it turned out he had been mistaken for someone else and his case was closed. It was reopened the following year on mistaken intelligence that he had contacted an Islamic State figure in Libya.

But although his case remained closed from that point, the report said Abedi ‘continued to be referenced from time to time in intelligence gathered for other purposes’.

Mr Anderson said: ‘On two separate occasions in the months prior to the attack, intelligence was received by MI5 whose significance was not fully appreciated at the time. In retrospect, the intelligence can be seen to have been highly relevant to the planned attack.’

He said the security services’ decision to disregard the intelligence was, with hindsight, ‘wrong’.

But he concluded that it was ‘unknowable’ whether opening a fresh investigation could have thwarted Abedi’s deadly plans.

In response to the findings, Miss Rudd told MPs the blame for the attacks ‘lies squarely’ with the terrorists. But Steve Howe, whose wife Alison, 45, died in the attack, told Channel 4 News: ‘It’s sort of a cover-up from the fact that everything could have been done a lot better.’

The two other attackers who had been on MI5’s radar were Butt, 27, the leader of the London Bridge attack, and Khalid Masood on Westminster Bridge.

The full internal reviews, which are highly classified and run to more than 1,100 pages, contain 126 recommendations.