Britain investigates missed signals over Manchester bomber

The New York Times

LONDON — Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, is investigating its response to warnings from the public about the threat posed by Salman Abedi, the suicide bomber who killed 22 people and wounded dozens more in an attack at a crowded pop concert in Manchester, England, last week.

A British government spokesman said Monday that the agency had opened two internal investigations last week, amid reports that the British authorities had been alerted to Abedi’s extremist views at least three times before the bombing.

The 22-year-old assailant, a Manchester resident of Libyan descent, had previously been flagged by MI5 as a “person of interest,” said a law enforcement official speaking on the condition of anonymity because the investigations are continuing. But Abedi had not been deemed dangerous, so his file was closed and his name was taken off a list of roughly 3,000 people under active investigation.

When a file is closed, all security alerts are removed. As a result, no warnings would have come up when Abedi showed his passport at border controls, the official said.

Several people who knew Abedi, including some of his friends, have said that they had warned authorities about his radical views over the past five years.

Abedi was barred from Didsbury Mosque, where his family worshipped, after he shouted at an imam who had condemned the ideology of the Islamic State group in a sermon, according to Akram Ramadan, a member of the Libyan community in Manchester who attends the mosque.

It is highly unusual for the British authorities to publicly confirm the existence of internal investigations into possible security lapses, but the British home secretary, Amber Rudd, welcomed the MI5 review Monday, saying it was “the right first step” in learning from the Manchester attack.

Police carried out a series of armed raids across Greater Manchester over the weekend that ended with the arrest of a 25-yearold man in the Old Trafford area of the city. The operation expanded Monday to Shoreham-by-Sea, on the southeastern coast of England, where counterterrorism police officers arrested a 23-year-old.

That brought the number of arrests in the case to 16, Greater Manchester Police said in a statement Monday. Of those, two people have been released without charge.

Police released a new image of the bomber Monday that showed him wheeling a blue suitcase through Manchester city center days before he carried out the attack.