Two judges have rejected a legal claim by families of the victims of the 2017 Manchester bombing that MI5 could have prevented the killings.
The justices at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) have ruled that their claim had been brought too late and could not continue.
Earlier this month, lawyers for the families told an IPT hearing that MI5 “missed opportunities” to stop the bomber, Salman Abedi, before he killed 22 people at a music concert.
There was a “realistic possibility” that the terrorist attack could have been prevented, the lawyers asserted, drawing on an official report into the bombing published last year.
By contrast, government lawyers contended that while MI5 may have departed from “best practice” in its approach to catching the bomber, this was not due to “intentional behaviour that could be characterised as being of an egregious or unconscionable nature”.
These claims were not even further deliberated by the IPT in its ruling on the lateness of the claim.
Andrew Roussos, father of eight-year old Saffie-Rose, who was the youngest victim of the bombing, told Declassified: “For us, the families, we had to wait six years for the report to come out. Now the case is being thrown out for being out of time. It’s shocking.
“It’s been tough to go through this and be always told ‘national security this’, ‘national security that’. And then to get to this point and be told, time’s up.
“What are they hiding? MI5, MI6 and the government don’t want to expose truth. They’ve done everything possible to stop this process. Where is the justice? They’re getting away with murder.”
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Closed evidence
The problem for the families, compounding the tragedy of losing their loved ones, can be summed up in three words – the secret state.
The hearing relied solely on the official inquiry into the Manchester bombing, but its report and process was fundamentally flawed.
It denied key information to the families and the wider public about connections between UK intelligence and the Abedi family.
The inquiry heard 10 days of “closed” evidence from MI5 witnesses, to which the victims’ families lawyers were barred.
Neither the secret intelligence service (MI6) nor eavesdropping agency GCHQ was called to give evidence.
This was despite the fact that Salman Abedi and his closest family were part of Libyan militias benefitting from British covert military support six years before the Manchester bombing.
Abedi is likely to have been radicalised by his experience in Libya in 2011, when UK forces allied with Libyan militant groups to overthrow the regime of Muammar Gaddafi.
The inquiry did not probe how the British military and security services had supported the same groups of which Salman and his father were members during the 2011 war.
There is also evidence that MI5 and MI6 encouraged radicals such as the Abedis to fight in Libya, and allowed them to travel to the country, a hotbed of terrorism, for years afterwards.
No serious efforts were made by the inquiry’s chairman to probe this issue either.
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Collusion
MI6 has escaped all accountability despite its extensive contact with the militant group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), going back several decades.
From its collusion in the 1990s in a plot to kill Gaddafi, to its suppression of the group after 9/11, the LIFG was well known to MI6, and Salman’s father was believed to have been a member of it.
Was any of this raised in the closed sessions? We just don’t know but it is unlikely given who was called to give evidence.
The irony is that this ignorance was used by government lawyers to try and close down the families’ case.
They said in written submissions to the IPT that “it is highly unlikely that further information” about the actions of the security services “will be brought to light before the Tribunal given the rigorous and comprehensive assessment of all the relevant events” by the inquiry.
Port stops
MI5 and Greater Manchester Police had numerous opportunities to stop Salman Abedi gaining military experience and contacts in Libya for years before the 2017 Manchester bombing.
But the Abedis were given free rein to travel to Libya. At no point between 2010 and 2017 was Salman Abedi subject to a port stop under the Terrorism Act, despite being on MI5’s radar.
A port stop gives officers the power to stop, question, search and detain individuals at UK borders to determine whether they have been concerned in the commission or preparation of an act of terrorism.
Salman Abedi returned to the UK from Libya just five days before his attack. The families’ lawyers argue that a port stop on Salman Abedi then “would have put the bomber ‘on notice’ that he was of significant interest, and of itself this may have had a deterrent effect”.
In the open evidence to the inquiry, MI5 officers divulged almost nothing that was not already in the public domain about what it knew of the Abedi family.
Now, the security service has been let off the hook again because of a legal technicality.
