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Britain’s Home Intelligence Service did not act quickly enough on key information and missed a major opportunity to prevent a suicide bombing that killed 22 people at a 2017 Ariana Grande concert in the North West of England, an investigation found on Thursday.
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Retired judge John Saunders, who led the investigation into the Manchester Arena attack, said the MI5 officer acknowledged that he believed the suicide bomber Salman Abedi was a possible national security problem, but did not discuss it with colleagues quickly enough.
“I found a significant missed opportunity to take action that could have prevented an attack,” he said.
Abedi, 22, detonated a backpack bomb in the arena foyer at the end of a concert on May 22, 2017, as thousands of young fans, including children, were leaving the pop star’s show. Abedi died in the explosion.
His brother Hashem Abedi was convicted in 2020 for helping to plan and carry out the attack. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Saunders said that if MI5 had acted on the intelligence it received, it could have resulted in Abedi being stopped at Manchester airport on his return from Libya just four days before the attack.
Richard Scorer, a lawyer representing 11 victims’ families, said the report was “a devastating conclusion for us.”
“Now it is very clear that key intelligence information about Salman Abedi has not been properly assessed; the failure to put it in its proper context and, most disastrously, the delay in taking action,” Scorer said. “The failures disclosed in this report are unacceptable.”
Several MI5 witnesses testified behind the closed doors of the investigation, and the intelligence was not released to the public.
Abedi was a “subject of interest” to MI5 officials in 2014, but his case was dropped shortly thereafter because he was considered low risk.
Saunders also said authorities failed to get Abedi involved in the government’s counter-terrorism program known as Prevention.
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“I came to the conclusion that there was at least a period in Salman Abedi’s path to violent extremism when he should have been guided,” he said.
Thursday’s report was the third and final report of the attack. Saunders had previously criticized arena security and local police for failing to identify Abedi as a threat. He also criticized delays and disruptions in the response of emergency services on the night of the blast.
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