British MI5 knew bomber supported the Islamic State before arena attack and admit he could have been stopped

MI5 knew the Manchester Arena bomber supported Isis before he carried out the terror attack and admit he could have been stopped.

Salman Abedi killed 22 people and injured hundreds more when he detonated a suicide bomb at the venue on 22 May, 2017.

The public inquiry on Tuesday heard further details about what security services knew about him in the months and years before the atrocity.

MI5 and North West Counter Terrorism officers were allowed to give evidence in “closed sessions” last year after chairman Sir John Saunders ruled hearing it in public could “compromise national security”.

On Tuesday counsel to the inquiry, Paul Greaney QC, read out a 15-page “gist” of what was disclosed.

The inquiry heard MI5 was “overstretched” and “under pressure across the board” when officers failed to act on intelligence about the Manchester Arena suicide bomber.

In April 2017, just a month before Abedi committed the atrocity, the security service team in the North West was put on “amber” alert due to its caseload, the public inquiry heard.

This was to indicate “a period of stress and high capacity” and that work should therefore be redistributed to other teams around the UK, the inquiry was told.

A senior MI5 officer, Witness J, said this overstretch was “unavoidable” and that the service was still able to “focus resources on the highest priority investigations”.

However, another MI5 witness said that the North West team experienced a “significant increase and change in workload” after Isis declared in 2014 that it was establishing a caliphate – or “Islamic State” – in Iraq and Syria, and was “struggling to cope”.

The inquiry has previously heard that MI5 failed to pass on “highly relevant” intelligence to counter terror police in Manchester on two occasions in the months before the bombing.

In an independent assessment of the security service and police internal reviews of terror attacks in the UK in 2017, Lord Anderson QC concluded that the significance of the intelligence received by MI5 was not fully appreciated at the time and thought to relate to non-nefarious or criminal activity on the part of Abedi.

Witness J stated that MI5 “had intelligence that Salman Abedi supported Islamic State”, but noted that “there were a large number of people during this period who expressed such support who did not pose a threat to UK national security”. They argued that there were some inconsistencies in the intelligence about the extent to which Abedi supported the aims of Isis “and what, if anything, he would do to achieve its aims through his actions”.

The inquiry heard that in the years running up to 2017, a lot of M15’s attention was on individuals looking to travel to Syria and ways to prevent them from travelling.

One MI5 witness commented that most of the individuals who travelled from Manchester had long-term plans to stay overseas and many were known to have died in combat. As a result, there were not many known “returnees”, the inquiry heard.

In late 2016, Counter-Terrorism Police did conduct an analysis of travellers from Manchester to Libya over a period of three months, looking at “fighting-age boys and men aged 16-30-years-old”, the inquiry was told.

The outcome was that 544 individuals were identified, all of whom were reviewed by Counter-Terror Police but none were made a “Subject of Interest”. Abedi was not one of the 544 individuals because he did not travel out of the UK within the three-month window.

Witness J confirmed that if MI5 had intelligence that Abedi was about to mount an attack and had been aware that he was returning to the UK on 18 May 2017, they would been in a position to “disrupt” the attack.

However, neither was the case.

Source: iNews