An expected report on Thursday denounced deficiencies in the actions of the British intelligence services, which did not process information that could have prevented the attack on the Manchester Arena in 2017, which left 22 dead.
“There was a missed opportunity to act significantly that could have prevented the attack” due to a delay in the processing of certain information, says this report that concludes a public investigation into this attack.
Lack of attacker tracking.
On May 22, 2017, a 22-year-old British man of Libyan origin, Salman Abedi, detonated a bomb outside this concert hall, after a performance by pop star Ariana Grande, killing seven children and fifteen adults and causing hundreds injured.
In his 200-page report, Judge John Saunders focused on Abedi’s radicalization and whether the attack could have been prevented. The report concludes that the intelligence services leaked information about Abedi and thus missed “an opportunity to take important investigative steps” against him.
“Based on everything that the security services knew or should have known, I believe that such investigative steps would have been a proportionate and justified response,” it added in its report. “There was a real possibility that it would have provided usable intelligence,” though he acknowledges that the chances of avoiding the attack would have been “low.”
For Richard Scorer, a lawyer who represents eleven of the families of the victims, the conclusions of the new report show that the lack of information “lost, at least, a chance to prevent the attack.” He called the underlined shortcomings “unacceptable.”
An already damning first report was published in June 2022 about the authorities’ inability to identify Salman Abedi as a threat. A second report in November 2022 this time looked at the authorities’ management of relief during the suicide attack, considering in particular that the Manchester Police Chief had quickly become “overwhelmed by the amount of work he had to do”. .
Source: BFM TV
