Britain’s MI5 intelligence services missed opportunities to try to prevent the Manchester Arena bombing, which killed 22 people in May 2017, a public inquiry into the attack concluded Thursday.
The final report of the investigation, chaired by retired judge John Saunders, stresses that MI5 obtained at least two pieces of information that pointed to the radicalization of the suicide bomber Salman Abedi, who carried out the attack, but the authorities did not take action in time. suitable.
“I have analyzed in detail the various occasions on which Salman Abedi could have been sent to Prevent (the program to prevent extremism). I have concluded that it should have been done,” Saunders said when reading his conclusions before a courtroom in Manchester magistrates.
The report also indicates that an intelligence agent had in his possession information about the terrorist that he considered relevant to national security, but did not immediately convey those concerns to a colleague or write a report about it. “The delay in making a report meant that a potentially important opportunity was missed,” the findings of the investigation emphasize.
On the evening of May 22, 2017, Abedi, born in Manchester and of Libyan descent, walked through the pavilion’s lobby as thousands of people were leaving the venue after a concert by American singer Ariana Grande.
At 22:31 GMT local time, the 22-year-old detonated the explosive he was carrying in a bulging backpack full of shrapnel. In addition to the fatalities, the attack injured more than 800 people, according to the conclusions of this investigation.
The third and last report published by those responsible for the investigation, which delves into Abedi’s radicalization process, stresses that it would have been “very difficult” for the “educational establishments” that the young man attended “to have been able to appreciate that he was advancing towards violent extremism”.
Lawyer Richad Scorer, who represented eleven families of victims of the attack, told the media that the conclusions of the process have been “painful to read, but also revealing.”
“It has become abundantly clear that key pieces of intelligence on Salman Abedi were not properly assessed,” the lawyer said. “As a result of these failures, at least the real possibility of preventing the attacks was lost,” said Scorer, who described his conclusions as “devastating.”
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
