One London attacker was on police radar
Intelligence services missed red flags in failing to stop attacks
The identifications suggested that the police and intelligence services had missed a series of red flags in failing to stop the attack.
LONDON — Britain on Monday identified two of the three suspects in the weekend’s terrorist assault in London, including one who not only was well-known to the police but had a cameo in a television documentary on homegrown violent jihadists.
The identifications immediately suggested that the police and intelligence services had missed a series of red flags in failing to stop the attack, which left seven people dead and dozens wounded in a nation still grappling with the Manchester concert bombing two weeks earlier.
The terrorist attack Saturday was the third to strike Britain in three months, all with the participation of radicalized British Muslims who had been on the radar of law enforcement but still plotted successfully.
The frequency of the attacks has created the impression of a sudden campaign against Britain hatched from within. But counterterrorism officials and others say the country has been a terrorist target for years. Even now, there are hundreds of investigations underway.
What is not publicized, they say, is how many attacks are prevented in the plotting phases.
“What’s got through is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Shiraz Maher, deputy director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization, at King’s College London. “And it’s an enormous iceberg.”
Mark Rowley, assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said after the attack on Westminster Bridge on March 22 that at least 13 plots had been broken up since 2013. Police and security officials say at least five others have been thwarted since then.
Recent examples, according to the police, include foiled conspiracies to crush U.S. soldiers with a van at an air base in southeast England, a drive-by shooting in West London by two men on a moped, and a Remembrance Day knife assault.
The three successful attacks reflect what counterterrorism experts call the reality that plots are underway all the time. Some contend that the number of radicalized individuals has become increasingly unmanageable, taking into account those who have returned from fighting in Syria and those frustrated that they cannot travel there.
Known to police
The suspects in the most recent attack — Rachid Redouane, 30, and Khurum Shazad Butt, 27, along with a third assailant — plowed through London Bridge pedestrians in a van Saturday night, then stabbed patrons at bars and restaurants in nearby Borough Market. All three were shot dead by police officers.
Police officials said Butt had been known to them and to MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency. More questions were raised Monday when footage resurfaced of a Channel 4 documentary broadcast last year, titled The Jihadis Next Door, in which Butt is seen among a group of men unveiling an Islamic State flag in London’s Regent’s Park.
Britain had been largely free of terrorism. Before March, the last major attack was in 2005, when suicide bombers coordinated an assault on London’s public transit system, killing 52. In 2013, two British-born converts to Islam, of Nigerian descent, butchered Lee Rigby, a British soldier, in daylight on the streets of London. Yet compared with Belgium, France and Germany, where terrorism has become more common, Britain was seemingly spared.
It was not for lack of trying on the part of militants. “Terrorist groups have wanted to strike the United Kingdom for a long time, and they’ve been very persistent in their effort,” said Raffaello Pantucci, a terrorism specialist at the London-based Royal United Services Institute.
Election looming
Still, the pace appears to have intensified during an election campaign that has placed Britain in the international spotlight, multiplying the publicity of any attack. As in France, where a police officer was killed on the Champs-Élysées before the presidential election in April, the attack on Saturday happened five days before Britons go to the polls.
“It’s political. It’s about trying to disrupt our democratic process,” said Nazir Afzal, a former chief crown prosecutor for the northwest area of England. Islamists in Britain have been distributing leaflets urging people not to vote, he said, adding, “They don’t believe in democracy.”
With terrorists resorting to everyday items like kitchen knives or vehicles as weapons, copycats have become an even more serious concern, Maher of King’s College London said.
“The way terrorism operates is that when a plot succeeds, it then motivates like-minded other people to get involved themselves,” he said. “People who are sympathetic, people who think, ‘If he could do it, I can do it.’ ”
“Right now, we’re in a particularly acute phase where three events have got through within a three-month period, and unlike in 2005, people aren’t having to consider making sophisticated bombs with multiple actors,” said Maher, author of a new book called Salafi-Jihadism. “It’s as simple as: Get a car and mow somebody down.”
Comparisons have been made between the attack Saturday and the one March 22, when a Briton, Khalid Masood, plowed a car into civilians on Westminster Bridge and fatally stabbed a police officer outside Parliament before he was shot dead.
Plots disrupted
About a month later, a man carrying a backpack full of knives was arrested near Prime Minister Theresa May’s residence on suspicion of planning a stabbing.
The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has long encouraged this type of crude attack. Two months ago, the group’s propaganda wing exhorted supporters to use fake bomb vests, knives and trucks to kill “crusaders” during the holy month of Ramadan.
The British authorities have released few details about the plots they have disrupted in recent years. One plot in 2015 was distrupted when two university students were caught planning a drive-by attack on a police station and army barracks in West London. The pair — Tarik Hassan and his friend Suhaib Majeed — were arrested after a surveillance team observed them buying a semiautomatic pistol with a silencer and bullets.