Six times Manchester terrorist slipped past spies and terror police
Salman Abedi came to the attention of MI5 in 2010, aged 15. For seven years he drifted on and off the security service’s radar more than 20 times, yet when critical information about his murderous plot fell into the hands of the spies before the bombing, they failed to grasp its significance.
The failure was catastrophic. Just four days after arriving back into the country from war-torn Libya, Abedi detonated a bomb, killing 22 people.
The blunder was one of six failings by MI5 and counter-terrorism police that Sir John Saunders, the chairman of the Manchester Arena inquiry, identified in his final set of findings.
The actionable intelligence
Sir John, a retired judge, found that MI5 missed a “significant” opportunity by failing to act on intelligence. Sir John said a better response from MI5 “might have prevented the attack” and could have led officers directly to the Nissan Micra, parked outside a block of flats called Devell House in the Rusholme area of Manchester. Inside lay his explosive device. There was said to be a “real possibility” that a quick investigation would have produced “actionable intelligence” and meant Abedi’s return to the UK from Libya on May 18, 2017 “would have been treated extremely seriously by the Security Service”.
Subject of interest
In 2013, Abedi was suspected of being an associate of someone being monitored by the security service.
He was designated a Tier 3 subject of interest in March 2014, but his case was closed that July. The same year Abedi and his brother Hashem travelled to Libya and were among 110 Britons evacuated by the Royal Navy’s HMS Enterprise. Neither the Ministry of Defence or police debriefed them.
The next year he was in contact with another suspect under surveillance for links to al-qaeda. He was made a subject of interest again but his case was open and shut on the same day.
He was made a de-facto subject of interest between 2015 and 2016.
Sir John said that if he had been formally made a subject of interest, intelligence officers would have needed to make a formal assessment to close the case and therefore missed “a valuable opportunity to take stock of the intelligence that is held”.
No attempts to deradicalise
Following the concerns about Abedi’s activity he should have been referred to Prevent, the deradicalisation programme. That could have seen him monitored by a multi-agency panel.
Abedi “displayed support for Islamic State”, including comments made while watching television. While at Trafford College between 2013 and 2015, a staff member saw a picture of him with a gun in Tripoli on his phone.
Messages with a convicted terrorist
Abedi’s friends were involved in drug dealing or other crime and Sir John said that he “had no connections that would tie him to law-abiding society”.
Among his friends was Abdalraouf Abdallah, who returned to Manchester with “a hero status” after being injured fighting in Libya. The pair texted 1,000 times to discuss “martyrdom, the maidens of paradise, and al-qaeda”. Abdallah was convicted of terror offences in May 2016.
Abdallah’s texts were discovered during the investigation into him and formed part of the case at his trial, but it was not established that Abedi had been in contact until after the bombing.
Delay in examining illicit phone
Abedi had visited Abdallah with two associates in January 2017 at HMP Altcourse, where they spent an hour and 47 minutes talking. He ordered bomb-making chemicals the same day.
The mobile used by Abdallah was seized in February 2017, but the billing information was not examined until June 2017, weeks after the attack.
The ‘risky’ strategy of MI5
MI5 was so fixated on the terrorists returning from Syria, that they “underestimated” the risk from Libya.
Abedi was radicalised in Libya, taking up arms in the civil war against Colonel Gaddafi alongside his extremist father in 2011. Sir John found the threshold MI5 applied on whether to investigate Libya returnees was “too high” and amounted to a “risky position”. MI5’S own Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre identified in 2010 “a danger of radicalisation of young members of the Libyan community in Manchester”.
In 2017, Abedi was referred for investigation. A meeting to discuss the case was due to be held on May 31, nine days after the attack.