There was confirmed links between him/his brother and ISIS, is that enough? If not, it should be.
The authorities were also aware that Abedi’s father was linked to a well-known militant Islamist group in Libya, which is proscribed in Britain. Abedi also had links to several British-based jihadis with Isil connections.
Granted you can't stop all terrorists (unfortunately - as you won't always have this much heads up with everyone), but reading that, I know if I was in charge, at the very least, wouldn't have allowed him to return from Libya after all the warnings. Would you have? I think in this instance, there are people who will be responsible for failings, just like you can have failings by the doctors, social services or police etc - it can happen.
Here we go again, here come the conspiracy theories.
There are over 3,000 possible terrorists on the MI5 watchlist, an additional 12,000 people below those who might have some links to extremism and over 500 major counter-terrorism investigations open at any one time. It's impossible to keep everyone under surveillance all the time.
From Fraser Nelson: "Seven years ago, a 25-year-old university dropout was caught in Kenya trying to join the terrorists of al-Shabaab. He was sent back home where MI5 kept an eye on him and, for a while, monitored his every move. He was certainly shifty, making calls from telephone boxes and meeting strange men in strange places. But this seemed to be explained by his low-level drug-dealing; he showed no sign of terrorist intent. After two years of fruitless surveillance, the spies gave up. A month later, he bought a cleaver and killed Drummer Lee Rigby on the streets of Woolwich.
To say that Michael Adebolajo was “known” to the security services is a gross understatement: they had interviewed him, categorised him as a top-tier terrorist risk and did everything they could to monitor him. But there were then – and are now – thousands of potential Islamic terrorists on the books of MI5. To keep so many people under such surveillance would require more of a Stasi than a Security Service. And the East Germans could easily intercept letters and phone calls: today, even teenagers can use sophisticated mobile phone apps to encrypt their gossip. A free country cannot keep watch on thousands of people.
So it’s not, really, so surprising to hear that Salman Abedi, the Manchester bomber, had been reported to MI5. The question is what the spies could have done, and whether they missed anything obvious. The picture is still being put together, and it’s not impossible that there was an egregious intelligence failure. But more likely we’re just witnessing the basic problem: how hard it is, in an era of globalisation and instant secret communication, to keep tabs on so many.
Consider the numbers. When the Twin Towers were attacked in 2001 there were just 250 people listed in MI5’s books as potential terrorists. Within seven years that had grown to 2,000 and when it hit 3,000, a few years ago, the spies drew the line. Not because the threat had subsided, but because there are only so many people that the 4,000 officers of MI5 can meaningfully observe. And if there are (as we learnt yesterday) 500 active investigations, then resources will be focused on them, rather than shifty losers reported by their neighbours.
When Jonathan Evans was director-general of MI5, he worked out where this was all leading. The agency had doubled in size and had a good grip of the terrorist threat, but it seemed statistically inevitable that a plot would succeed – and that the culprit would have been on an MI5 list, leading suggestions that it let the killer slip. He was also concerned that the sheer number of plots being thwarted would give a false sense of security.
if the ministers can be accused of complacency, it’s harder to pin the accusation on the spies. They see anti-terrorism as a struggle that will mean a long line of invisible successes, studded by high-profile failure. On the rare occasions that the spies speak, they try to make this point, as Andrew Parker did when he took over MI5. “Being on our radar,” he said, “does not necessarily mean being under our microscope.” In other words: if an attack happens, don’t be surprised if the perpetrator was “known” to MI5. To be a “person of interest” is to join a cast of thousands.
There will be an inquiry into why Salman Abedi was not apprehended after the MI5 tip-offs, but its conclusion is likely to be the same as into the Woolwich murderer: there’s only so much a modern intelligence service can realistically be expected to do. The odds are that there is no political scandal here, but instead a simple and depressing truth: that we are as safe as we’re likely to get."