MI5 officer defends ‘reasonable’ decision not to launch probe into Salman Abedi before Manchester Arena bombing
A senior MI5 officer said it was "reasonable" to decide not to investigate Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi based on the intelligence on him before the attack.
The officer, identified only as witness J, was screened from the public gallery where families of the victims sat watching, some shaking their heads as they listened to his evidence to the inquiry.
It was suggested to him that someone in MI5 should have "joined the dots" as intelligence about the Manchesterborn suicide bomber came in over a six-year period prior to the attack.
The inquiry was told that, from December 2013 to January 2017, Abedi was identified as being in direct contact with three men, all separate "subjects of interest" - one suspected of planning travel to Syria, one with links to al-qaida and the third with links to extremists in Libya.
And between April 2016 and April 2017, a month before the Manchester Arena attack, he was identified as a secondlevel contact with three more subjects of interest, all with suspected links to the Islamic State terror group.
Paul Greaney QC, counsel to the inquiry, asked the witness: "The more a person of an extremist mindset I'm in contact with, the greater the concern I might share their mindset?"
Witness J said: "It doesn't necessarily follow that having contact with a subject of interest is a cumulative risk.
"We have to make very fine judgments about whether someone meets the threshold of investigation; it can't be just on contact, it has to be more than that.
"A second-level contact is a contact of a contact. A secondlevel contact is just that, and I'm not sure that, to me, that indicates a cumulative risk developing."
Intelligence on Abedi came in right up to the months before he blew himself up with a home-made bomb packed with shrapnel, murdering 22 innocent bystanders and injuring hundreds of other people in the foyer of Manchester Arena at the end of an Ariana Grande concert on May 22, 2017.
On one occasion Abedi had himself been made a "subject of interest" but his file was closed five months later, in July 2014, based on a "lack of engagement" with extremists.