MI5 has admitted for the first time that it made a mistake in failing to track the 2017 Manchester Arena suicide bomber.
The report out this morning from the Intelligence and Security Committee, which looked into the attacks not just in Manchester but also at Westminster,London Bridge, Finsbury Park and Parsons Green, in which thirty six lives were lost.
MP’s there were a number of failures in the handling of Salman Abedi’s case and while it is
impossible to say whether these would have prevented the devastating attack on 22 May, and concluded that, as a result of the failings, potential opportunities to prevent it were missed.
The report finds that Abedi visited an extremist contact in prison on more than one occasion, however no follow-up action was taken by either MI5 or Counter Terrorism Policing (CTP).
They also flagged issues around travel arise in the case of Abedi and other perpetrators. MI5 decided not to place travel monitoring or travel restrictions on Salman Abedi which allowed him to return undetected to the UK in the days immediately before he carried out his attack. MI5 have since admitted that given the information they had on Abedi, they should have done so.
The case also highlighted deficiencies in MI5’s system for monitoring individuals of interest not currently under active investigation (and – in the case of another of the perpetrators – the system for monitoring those seen in the peripheries of more than one investigation).
Abedi had in fact been flagged for review, but MI5’s systems moved too slowly and the review had not happened prior to him launching his attack.
The committee also noted in relation to Abedi that, despite being known to MI5 from 2014, he was not at any point considered for a referral to the Prevent programme.
MP’s have also recommended that the government should lobby businesses to pull advertising from online platforms such as Google and Facebook unless those companies move more quickly to remove extremist material and assist the security services in tackling terrorists that use their channels to communicate,
