Could the Manchester Arena attack in 2017 have been avoided? A report on Thursday denounced shortcomings in the action of the British intelligence services, which did not process certain information.
“There was a missed significant opportunity to act which could have avoided the attack”, which caused 22 deaths, due to a delay in processing certain information, points out this report published on Thursday, which concludes a public inquiry on this attack.
On May 22, 2017, a 22-year-old Briton of Libyan origin, Salman Abedi, detonated a bomb outside this concert hall, after a performance by pop star Ariana Grande, killing seven children and 15 adults and causing hundreds of injuries. In his 200-page report, Sir John Saunders focused on Abedi’s radicalization and whether the attack could have been averted.
The terrorist not identified as a threat
The report concludes that the intelligence services leaked information about Abedi and thus missed “the opportunity to take significant investigative steps” against him. “Based on everything the security services knew or should have known, I believe that such investigative steps would have been a proportionate and justified response to take,” he added in his report.
“There was a real possibility that it would have provided usable intelligence”, although he acknowledged that the chances of avoiding the attack would have been “low”. For Richard Scorer, a lawyer who represents eleven of the families of victims, the conclusions of the new report show that the lack of information “have caused the loss, at the very least, of a possibility of avoiding the attack”. He described as “unacceptable” the shortcomings underlined.
An already damning first report on the authorities’ inability to identify Salman Abedi as a threat was published in June 2022. A second report in November 2022 this time scrutinized the management of relief by the authorities during the suicide attack, considering in particular that the Manchester police chief had quickly been “overwhelmed by the amount of work he had to do”.