Families bereaved by the Manchester Arena attack have told Keir Starmer that MI5 failed them and must be fully included in the Hillsborough Law
In a letter to Sir Keir Starmer, seen by the BBC, they ask the prime minister: “How many times must MI5 show that it cannot be trusted before something is done?”
The public inquiry into the Arena terror attack in 2017 found the service missed opportunities to act on intelligence that could have prevented the attack. revealed that the MI5 officers who handled the intelligence had understood, at the time, that both pieces of intelligence on the bomber Salman Abedi could relate to terrorism.
Pete Weatherby KC, director of the Hillsborough Law Now campaign group, told the BBC he had been “misled” by ministers during negotiations over how the law will apply to MI5, MI6 and GCHQ and also accused the Government of putting forward “measures relating to intelligence services which look better than they are, and we’ve ended up in a position which certainly wasn’t the position that we negotiated with them”.
