Social media giants face boycott call over terror failings
MPS call on businesses to pull their advertising Tech firms ‘still refusing to remove extremist content’ MI5 is criticised over attacks that killed 32
‘There is a wider society debate about some of the material out there and the effect that ... is having on people’
MPS on the intelligence and security committee (ISC) looking at last year’s five major terrorist attacks have highlighted a string of failings by MI5 and counter-terrorism police which could have prevented the outrages:
Manchester
On May 22 last year, Salman Abedi, a British-born Muslim of Libyan origin, detonated a suicide bomb at the Manchester Arena, killing 22 people and injuring more than 100, many of them children.
Abedi was first investigated by MI5 in 2014 after he was seen acting suspiciously alongside a known terrorist suspect. The following year, his telephone number was identified as having been used to contact a known extremist who was under investigation.
He was also flagged up to officials due to his extremist views but officials concluded he did not pose a threat.
Throughout this period, Abedi remained on the periphery of MI5’S inquiries and was not warranted a high-priority investigation.
But in their ISC report, MPS said the agencies needed to do more to monitor low-risk suspects in order to ensure that risk did not change: “We urge MI5 to consider what more can be done to connect those seen on the peripheries of investigations, including what processes they need to have in place to take account of the cumulative effect of an individual appearing on the periphery of numerous investigations.”
In March 2017, the Security Service, carrying out a review of low-priority subjects of interest, decided Abedi was worth further investigations.
However, as the ISC report identified: “Final decisions on this had not taken place by the time [Abedi] launched his attack.”
While he was on MI5’S radar, Abedi visited in prison Abdal Raouf Abdallah, an extremist, who was serving a fiveand-a-half-year sentence for trying to help people travel to Syria to join Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil). Despite knowing about the visits, MI5 did not subject Abedi to any further surveillance or monitoring. The MPS concluded: “The monitoring of visitors to extremist prisoners below category A is haphazard. This is concerning: it allows known extremist prisoners to potentially maintain links with those vulnerable to extremism. The Government should consider expanding the Approved Visitor Scheme to include all extremist prisoners.”
MPS also highlighted the “key role” online material had played in radicalising Abedi, but they acknowledged that he was likely to have gained further expertise in Libya.
The ISC report was critical of the system for regulating the purchase of materials that terrorists could use to make bombs, describing it as “out of date”.
The Security Service and police were also criticised for failing to subject Abedi to travel monitoring restrictions, allowing him to go to Libya in the weeks before the attack. Finally, MPS were critical of the fact that Abedi was never referred to the anti-radicalisation Prevent programme.
Last night one of the victims, Robby Potter, said the secret service should be taken to court over the failings.
Westminster
Khalid Masood, who was a Muslim convert, murdered four people in March last year when he drove his hired car across Westminster bridge, ploughing into pedestrians.
After crashing the vehicle, he attempted to storm the Palace of Westminster, stabbing Pc Keith Palmer to death before being shot and killed by an armed officer. While his attack required less planning and preparation than the Manchester outrage, MPS found there were still opportunities for him to have been stopped.
Masood had a lengthy criminal record dating back to 1978 and converted to Islam while in prison in 2000.
The report stated that while there was no evidence Masood was radicalised in prison, converts who had been to prison were around four times more likely to be convicted of an Islamist-related offence than the general British Muslim population.
Masood was on MI5’S radar between 2004 and 2013 due to his participation in extremist circles. In April 2004, his phone number was found among 100 contained in the contacts list of Waheed Mahmoud, later convicted of plotting a bombing campaign in Britain.
In 2009, MI5 officials received intelligence that someone called “Masood” was engaging in extremist activity in Saudi Arabia. The following year, he was put under investigation as a “subject of interest”, but two years later that file was closed.
The report found that between 2012 and 2016, MI5 was aware that he had been in contact with other “individuals of interest” but did not believe he warranted further investigation and he was treated only as a peripheral figure.
In their findings, the MPS said: “From the date of his phone number first appearing on the periphery of an investigation, it took MI5 over six years to identify Masood. This is despite email addresses and phone numbers, which we now know to have belonged to him, being in contact with known extremists on numerous occasions, and his being mentioned in reporting.
“While we recognise that ‘joining the dots’ between hitherto unconnected pieces of information and identifiers is a highly complex task, we nonetheless urge MI5 to consider what more can be done to connect those on the peripheries of investigations.”
It was further established that Masood had viewed extremist material online including videos on Youtube showing beheadings and executions. MPS also called for more checks around the hiring of vehicles to prevent their use in terrorist attacks.
Masood hired his grey Hyundai Tuscon in Birmingham on March 8, six days before the attack. The report said: “Given the propensity for vehicles to be used as weapons, monitoring vehicle hire must be a significant element of counter-terrorism work.”
London Bridge
Eight people were killed and dozens injured on June 3 when Khuram Butt, Rachid Redouane and Youseff Zaghba used a van to run pedestrians over on London Bridge before resuming the attack on foot and stabbing people randomly.
It later emerged that Butt had been known to MI5 for two years, having been associated with Al Muhajiroun, the extremist group.
In 2015, MI5 received information suggesting that Butt wanted to carry out an attack in the UK, but the investigation was downgraded when no evidence of a plot was uncovered. The ISC report said the investigation was suspended twice due to “competing pressures” from higher priority inquiries.
While Butt’s accomplices had not been investigated by MI5 before the attack, the agency had received one piece of intelligence regarding Zaghba’s attempt to travel from Italy to Istanbul in March 2016.
Officials in Italy recorded that he had told them he was going to Istanbul to be a “terrorist, quickly correcting himself to say tourist”.
The Italian authorities placed him on the Schengen Information System alert list but he was wrongly categorised under crime rather than national security, meaning it was not referred to MI5 by the National Crime Agency.
Zaghba was able to travel between the UK and Italy on three occasions between May 2016 and January last year with no action taken other than the UK Border Force noting his arrival.
The MPS noted, critically, that the processes and systems used for information sharing with foreign partners appeared to have not worked and efforts are now taking place to tighten up the Europe-wide system.
They added: “One factor that cannot be ignored is the potential impact of Brexit on the intelligence agencies’ ability to corroborate with international partners … the UK’S exit from the EU must not impact on the information-sharing relationships and powers currently available to the UK intelligence community.”
Finsbury Park
Two weeks after the attack at London Bridge, Darren Osborne, a career criminal, drove a hire van from his home in south Wales to north London where he ploughed into a group of worshippers leaving a mosque in Finsbury Park.
One person was killed and 10 others sustained serious injuries in what was later established to be a terrorist attack aimed at the Muslim community.
Osborne had an extensive criminal history, with 33 convictions for more than 100 offences. He had never been investigated by the security services and was not known to have any links to far-right or extremist organisations. It later emerged he had been heavily influenced, not by illegal extremist material, but by Three Girls, the BBC drama about the Rochdale grooming scandal.
Neil Basu, the Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner, told the committee: “It is what happens in the minds of malleable people ... there is a wider society debate about some of the material out there and the effect that... is having on people who want to commit these acts.”
Parsons Green
While no one was killed in the Parsons Green Tube bomb attack in September last year, 23 people received burns when the device left by Ahmed Hassan partially exploded.
Hassan came to the UK as an asylum seeker, but despite telling officials he had been trained to kill by Isil, he was not investigated by MI5. Counter-terrorism police referred him to the Channel programme – helping those at risk of radicalisation – and experts were closing his file when he carried out his
‘We urge MI5 to consider what more can be done to connect those on the peripheries of [inquiries]’
attack. MPS said: “There have been fundamental failings in the manner in which Hassan’s case was dealt with by the Home Office, counter-terrorism police and Surrey County Council. The litany of errors that resulted in Hassan’s attack-planning passing unnoticed, despite his participation in Channel, highlights deep-rooted issues in the administration of the Prevent strand.”
Hassan had bought key ingredients for his device from Amazon and MPS said tighter controls were needed to stop terrorists obtaining such material without detection.