Judges in the High Court have ruled that over 300 people affected by the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 cannot continue their legal action against failures by MI5 as their case had been brought too late and could not continue.
Twenty-two innocent people lost their lives as a result of a suicide bombing. Many others were seriously injured.The bomber Salman Abedi died in the explosion. His brother Hashem Abedi was subsequently tried and convicted of twenty-two murders on the basis of joint enterprise. He is serving a life sentence.
The subsequent Inquiry found that there was a significant missed opportunity to take action that might have prevented the Attack.
It was not possible to reach any conclusion on the balance of probabilities or to any other evidential standard as to whether the Attack would have been prevented.
However, there was a realistic possibility that actionable intelligence could have been obtained which might have led to actions preventing the Attack.
The reasons for this significant missed opportunity included a failure by a Security Service Officer to act swiftly enough. The Inquiry has also identified problems with the sharing of information between the Security Service and Counter Terrorism Policing, although none of these problems is likely to have had any causative significance
The judges considered three claims brought by Hudgell Solicitors.One by the estate of Chloe Rutherford who was 17 years old at the time of her death in the incident.
A second by Eve Hibbert who was 14 at the date of the incident and is now 21 years old. Eve does not have capacity to act because of the injuries she sustained. She is now largely wheelchair-bound and requires full-time care and a third by Lesley Callander,the mother of Georgina Bethany Callander who was 18 at the time of her death on 23 May 2017.
Lesley Callander went to the venue to collect her daughter and witnessed the devastation and chaos there. She also witnessed her daughter being administered CPR at various points on the night in question. She was later informed that her daughter had died. She has suffered psychiatric injury as a result of witnessing the immediate aftermath of the bombing.
In their ruling the judges said that they wereo conscious of the horrendous impact of the atrocity on the Claimants and their families. Any reasonable person would have sympathy for them. The grief and trauma which they have suffered, particularly where young children were killed, is almost unimaginable.
However they say that they have reached the conclusion that, in all the circumstances, it would not be equitable to permit the claims to proceed.
