Salman Abedi wasn't a lone wolf – he was a known wolf, and the Muslim community tried to warn us about him

[Guest]

Our Prime Minister was Home Secretary and in charge of MI5 when they were tipped off about Abedi – do the victims’ families have a right to an explanation of why the warnings were not heard?

“What more can a law abiding Muslim do?” asked an exasperated radio host yesterday morning, after it emerged that the Manchester bomber’s family and friends tipped off MI5, who then missed five opportunities to stop him.

I wasn’t surprised that he’d been reported – Muslims are as scared of getting blown up as everyone else.

Many Muslim nations have been ruined by these people. Our communities have been torn apart. We worry about our children’s minds being attacked. You check your kids’ web histories for porn – we do that too, but some of us also check for jihadi twitter accounts.

So it is completely natural for us to be the first to make the phone call when we see someone being a threat to our country and communities – even if we have sometimes felt excluded from the government’s top-down approach to the Prevent strategy.

But why are the pundits so quiet today? Shouldn’t they be as elated about Muslims reporting the terrorist, as they were outraged yesterday about “Muslims having to do more?”

Why is a bad Muslim Brit more newsworthy than a good Muslim Brit? Why hasn’t Trevor Philips been hastily commissioned to host an edgy documentary exposing how British Muslims act as unpaid informants for an under-resourced security service?

And under-resourced they are – that is certain. There are 3,000 people on the UK terror watch list. MI5 has 4,000 staff. It takes 30 people to keep a terror suspect under surveillance – do the maths.

The Americans spend five times as much as us (per capita) on intelligence. So why do we think we can do it on the cheap? Why do some of our politicians think our streets will stay safe, even though Greater Manchester police have had to let go nearly a third of their officers since 2010?

At a time when our nation is crying out for leadership, it has fallen to the opposition to demand more resources for first responders and crucially, for our security services. The opposition have also started to unpick the messy relationship between our foreign policy decisions abroad and terror at home.

I’m not just talking about the Iraq War.

I’m also talking about our foreign policy elite spending millions to inadvertently create British Jihadis in proxy wars in Libya, instead of letting our security services do their job properly.

Our Prime Minister was Home Secretary and in charge of MI5 when they were tipped off about Abedi – do the victims’ families have a right to an explanation of why the warnings were not heard?

Let it not be said that Muslims didn’t cooperate with the authorities to report Abedi. Abedi flew a black Jihadi flag out of his window in Manchester. He was banned from his mosque. His Imam reported him. His family reported him. His friends reported him. He wasn’t a lone wolf – he was a known wolf.

But MI5 didn’t stop him. Not because they didn’t want to: because they are being run on a shoestring, while Whitehall spends taxpayers’ money on propping up friends in Libya.

I am willing to pay more taxes if it means 8-year-old girls come home alive from pop concerts. I’m sure you are too. But even if you’re not, that might not be necessary: we spend twice as much on Trident as we do on security and intelligence.

Last week, my niece asked me for Ariana Grande tickets. I’ve promised to take her, as soon as the tour restarts. I will do anything I can to help our security services keep her safe. What more can a law abiding Muslim do?

Muddassar Ahmed is chair of Forum for Change, a British think tank working on issues of inclusion and diversity

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/salman-abedi-manchester-attack-reported-family-imam-friends-did-nothing-a7757726.html


If it had been a Labour Home Secretary who presided over this, and had cut the police, fire and border services, there would be hell to pay. But the media are strangely quiet about this, and we all know why.

[Guest]

And of course this:



Lets just make sure you notice that sentence:

ARGUABLY THE KEY POINT IN ALL THIS MESS IS THAT RAMADAN PROFITED FROM THE MI5 RAT LINE TRANSPORTING LIBYANS BACK TO THE HOME COUNTRY TO FIGHT GADDAFI. THE MINISTER IN CHARGE OF AUTHORISING THIS 'POLICY' - THERESA MAY!!!

[Guest]

Wow the left really have sunken to a new low here trying to blame the present PM.

Then we have a conspiracy claim based from a page with no sources. How embarressing

So clearly MI5 did not view him as an imminent threat. He was on their radar, but its near impossible to monitor everyone. To then say in hindsight after an attack is as about as disgusting as it gets. Being tipped  off 7 years ago, shows clearly at the time he was not an imminent threat in 2010. Now lets apply sassy's logic and how she would bankrupt the nation if we sought to monitor every single one of the 3,000 current suspects?

Let me explain how even further it is disgusting to claim.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd said he was "known, up to a point", whatever that means, but it certainly suggests that he was not deemed a serious threat; just one of the 3,000 or so people on the official counter-terror radar

But it is impractical to keep a constant eye on more than a fraction of such suspects. And here's why.

Full, 24-hour surveillance of a suspect typically involves at least two teams of 15 specialists, each working a 12-hour shift which must include time for travel, debrief, evidence log and meals.

If they are lucky they will get six hours' sleep, so already their capability is being reduced.

They might maintain their level of sharpness for a few days, but then fatigue and boredom sets in, or they get spotted by those they are watching and have to be replaced.

So, for longer-term surveillance you need a third team of another 15 specialists to supplement those who drop out of the first two.

As time and the surveillance goes on team members get ill, or need a day off, or have to sit promotion exams, or have family issues, or need to attend vital training days, or special skills or safety update sessions. After only a few weeks you need a fourth team and suddenly it's a surveillance operation that involves 60 people.

Sixty people for each of the 3,000 terror suspects adds up to 180,000 individuals, a number far greater than the combined staff of all UK police and MI5.


http://news.sky.com/story/expensive-and-impractical-why-uk-police-struggle-to-watch-terror-suspects-10891865

[Guest]

https://www.ft.com/content/42cabb04-4203-11e7-9d56-25f963e998b2


Salman Abedi was 16 when he first visited Libya, the country his parents had fled in 1993 to escape persecution under Muammer Gaddafi. But this was no ordinary coming-of-age trip for Abedi. Once there, he reunited with his father, who had left his family in Manchester three years earlier to aid the revolution against Gaddafi. And, according to friends of the family, members of the Libyan community in Manchester and sources in Libya, Abedi had come to fight.

He was not alone. It was 2011, and dozens of other Mancunians were already there. Mustafa Graf, the imam of the Didsbury mosque, the centre of the Libyan community in south Manchester, had also travelled back to Libya to help topple Gaddafi. Manchester became a fundraising centre for their war effort. Preachers travelled between the two countries, encouraging the fight, invariably couching it in terms of jihad.

This week, the 22-year-old Abedi detonated a rucksack filled with tricyclic acetone peroxide, bolts and nails, murdering 22 others and maiming dozens more, many of them children and young adults, in the worst terror attack to strike the UK since the 7/7 London bombings 12 years earlier. The attack on the Manchester Arena cast a spotlight on the city and its community of Libyan exiles, dozens of whom have gone to fight in Libya in recent years with Islamist militias.

Throughout the years of Gaddafi rule in Libya, Manchester was a magnet for Libyan exiles like the Abedis. The city’s Libyan community, one of the largest outside Libya, is tightly knit. “Everyone knows everyone,” says one Libyan living in the city.

Britain’s intelligence agencies knew the community well, too, and had longstanding dealings with its Islamist contingent. But the attack raises serious questions over their assessment of it. MI5, the UK’s domestic intelligence agency, facilitated the travel of many Islamist Mancunians back to Libya.

Until recently, the UK’s spymasters have not seen the community as a particular threat. Libyan Islamists in Manchester, many believed, were too focused on waging a national jihad in their homeland to be a threat to the UK. Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war and the spate of attacks in France, Belgium and Germany, anti-terror work in the UK and Europe has focused on young returnees from Syria.

Security officials have repeatedly sketched out the dangerous dynamics the Syrian crisis has unleashed: a cohort of young Britons who will be brutalised by the conflict, skilled in the trade and tools of war, connected to transnational networks of fellow fighters by powerful bonds of kinship and shared suffering.

It is a prognosis that holds true for the civil war in Libya. The story of Salman Abedi is one of a parallel, overlooked jihad to that in Syria.

“These are fundamentally questions of identity. What are the local grievances that would lead someone to blow up a load of young people at a concert with nails and bolts? Manchester isn’t the city that made those grievances fester and grow,” says Richard Barrett, former director of global counter terrorism operations at MI6. “It’s the ability of groups like Isis to wrap up your individual and local anxieties and grievances into this overall huge picture — to make you a somebody.”


Throughout Abedi’s childhood in Manchester, Libya was ever-present. The vast majority of Libyans in the city are well integrated, but some cliques remain staunchly nationalist, still affected by the brutal treatment at the hands of Gaddafi’s regime that prompted many families to flee. Islamist views — the cause of that persecution — often shade into such nationalism.

Ramadan Abedi, Salman’s father, was a member of the Libyan nationalist-
Islamist nexus in Manchester. By some accounts, he was a senior member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, the liberation movement that was the core of anti-Gaddafi Salafism. His sons grew up with tales of the injustices inflicted on devout Muslims in Libya.

When Salman was 13, his father returned to Libya as part of a deal brokered between the Gaddafi regime — then keen to rehabilitate itself on the global stage — and émigré Islamists. It was an uneasy rapprochement, and one in which the UK’s intelligence agencies were deeply involved, as they sought to mine information from both sides to advance the war on terror.

Three years later, in 2011, the uneasy settlement in Libya had broken apart in the wake of the Arab uprisings, and the country was at war. It was then that Salman and his father were reunited.

The reunion took place against a backdrop of mounting western concern over Libya. As Gaddafi’s repression grew bloodier, Britain and France led a push for military intervention. The UK’s military role in the Nato-led coalition that ousted the regime is well documented. Less well covered is the degree to which it facilitated the movement of anti-Gaddafi Islamists from Britain. Dozens of émigrés who had fled Gaddafi for Manchester returned to fight him.

In Libya, many connected with Islamist militias, the most capable anti-Gaddafi forces, and swelled their ranks.

Bilal Bettammer, a Libyan student and social activist in the revolution, now a lawyer in Canada, recalls the influx.

“I’d say of the more hardline groups, 60 or 70 per cent of their fighters in the beginning were from abroad. In 2011 we noticed a big influence from Manchester. There were lots of them in Derna. There were Libyan families here cashing British welfare cheques. Those went a long way in dinar.”

Mr Bettammer recalls watching a British preacher in Libya. “We have to choose sharia and reject secularism, he was saying. He was from Manchester, talking about stories of his life there. About the need to convert people. It was all the usual rhetoric but, in Libya, it had a violent meaning.”

Mr Bettammer says he and other secularist campaigners tried to warn the British ambassador to Libya at the time about the number of Britons and their radical views but were rebuffed. The UK, he says, wanted to encourage them instead because it viewed the Islamist groups as a more viable anti-Gaddafi alternative to native secularists.

Libyans dubbed the ranks of British Islamists “double shafras” — shafra is the Arabic word for a SIM card. It is a telling metaphor for the degree to which the fighters easily straddled two worlds. Back in Manchester, the phenomenon was well known in the Libyan community. “I think everyone knows someone who went,” a local housewife says.

But within the Libyan foreign fighter movement another divide would emerge, as younger fighters became more radicalised.

Akram Ramadan, a Libyan who lives upstairs from one of the flats in Manchester’s Whalley Range neighbourhood that was raided in the wake of the attack, says a “lack of family control” led many of the younger Mancunian fighters towards violent anti-western jihadism. Mr Ramadan fought against Gaddafi in the revolution and saw its effects on the sons of Manchester’s Libyan fighters.

“They’re not accepted in any society — this society or that society over there,” Mr Ramadan says. “Here, they look foreign. There, they sound foreign. There’s no acceptance of them or appreciation for what they did.

“It happened to a lot of kids. They hung about together and played football together. Some of them went into drugs. Some of them got their heads down and went into study. Some were easy picking for the terrorists.”

Even before Abedi’s atrocity, there was evidence of the problem.

Last year, Abdelraouf Abdallah, who had fought in Libya, was jailed for terrorism offences. Police said he had become one of Isis’s most prolific recruiters in the UK. He was well known to the Abedi family. After a bullet in his spine left him wheelchair-bound in 2012, Abedi’s brother Ramadan spent time at Abdallah’s bedside in Tripoli.

It is still far from clear when or how Salman Abedi fell in with Isis — or even if he did. Isis has claimed him as a member, but the group’s messaging has been uncharacteristically confused.

UK security officials are treading carefully. The connections between the Abedis and Islamist networks in Libya are firmly established, says one western diplomat based in Tripoli. But the interactions between those networks and Isis is still unclear.

In some ways, the distinctions as to which group a terrorist like Abedi took directions from are artificial, says Raffaello Pantucci, international director at the think-tank RUSI. “Before you may have had these specific networks, but really the key point now is that, certainly in the UK context, it’s all the same pool of people — the same radical community that these extremist groups’ attack planners go fishing in.”

Homegrown terrorists like Abedi, Mr Pantucci says, are less likely to make doctrinaire distinctions about the groups they are affiliated with than the senior figures in those groups directing them. “These kids go to a war zone populated by Islamists, then they come back to the UK, they know bombs, they know how to make bullets,” says Mr Bettammer, the former activist. “[Salman Abedi] was in Libya fighting other Muslims. What do you think he’s going to do when he’s back in the UK?”





And who would have to have authorised M15 - The Home Secretary Theresa May.   If it's a conspiracy theory, the Financial Times is in on it.

[Guest]

So nothing to counter my points, just more spamming

[Guest]

You have no point Dodge, in fact it's safe to say you are the most point-less individual it's been my bad luck to come across.

[Guest]

You have no point Dodge, in fact it's safe to say you are the most point-less individual it's been my bad luck to come across.

Oh wow, Sassy telling me I am wrong again, without any reason to back her claim

That is because she cannot answer my points

So lets shows some more

Are you saying we should not allow people into this country based on beliefs?

Are you backing the view then to ban Muslims?

You must be by highlighting the the part of bringing into the country Islamist,s and helping the return to their country

I really cannot stand knee jerk reactions that look to blame the MI5 which has thwarted countless attacks. People are very naive to think we will stop all of them. Or as stated being able to monitor all suspects.

[Raggamuffin]

So his father was a refugee who took advantage of the generosity of the UK, and then used it as a base to wage war in another country. Whether intentional or not, he raised his son to be a jihadist. If you come here looking for safety, don't cause trouble.

[Guest]

So his father was a refugee who took advantage of the generosity of the UK, and then used it as a base to wage war in another country. Whether intentional or not, he raised his son to be a jihadist. If you come here looking for safety, don't cause trouble.

Absolutely and he should be charged with High treason

[Guest]

So his father was a refugee who took advantage of the generosity of the UK, and then used it as a base to wage war in another country. Whether intentional or not, he raised his son to be a jihadist. If you come here looking for safety, don't cause trouble.

Suggest you read it again and understand it this time. MI5 ENCOURAGED THEM TO GO BACK OUT TO LIBYA TO FIGHT GADAFFI. At the time our Government were trying to undermine him.

[Raggamuffin]

So his father was a refugee who took advantage of the generosity of the UK, and then used it as a base to wage war in another country. Whether intentional or not, he raised his son to be a jihadist. If you come here looking for safety, don't cause trouble.

Suggest you read it again and understand it this time.   MI5 ENCOURAGED THEM TO GO BACK OUT TO LIBYA TO FIGHT GADAFFI.  At the time our Government were trying to undermine him.

I suggest you go and sort out the foul morons on your own forum before you start telling me what to do. You want to be seen to be better? Drop the attitude then.

I don't give a toss who encouraged who. The murderer's father came here, took advantage of our generous system, and then caused trouble and raised children who are clearly not fit to be in this country. Thankfully, most of them are not here any more, and hopefully will never be allowed to come here again.

[Guest]

So his father was a refugee who took advantage of the generosity of the UK, and then used it as a base to wage war in another country. Whether intentional or not, he raised his son to be a jihadist. If you come here looking for safety, don't cause trouble.

Suggest you read it again and understand it this time.   MI5 ENCOURAGED THEM TO GO BACK OUT TO LIBYA TO FIGHT GADAFFI.  At the time our Government were trying to undermine him.

So are you saying it was wrong to fight Gadaffi?

That we should do the Far left wing approach and simple watch innocent people continue to die needlessly?

Like we did where half a million have died in Syria and 9 million have been displaced, creating further problems off this? Is that your approach. I did not see millions leave Libya due to our intervention, why was that?

Clearly at the time he was seen as an asset in the fight against Gadaffi and they clearly based on present events, made an error of judgement in this case. Which has come back to bite them. They have to live with that, but what they don't need is people like you doing everything in your power to take the blame away from the real culprit here. Islamic extremism and hate against the west. You try anything to pick on those who daily have thwarted countless terrorist attacks against the UK. Who simply have not the means or money to watch all suspects. When its inconceivable to even believe we can prevent all attacks. yes lessons have to be learnt from mistakes, of which the MI5 has to learn from. But you and other lefties need to learn where the real cause of this problem is from. Islamic extremism

[veya_victaous]

So WHY did the Uk ingore the reports from Britsh Muslims?
Is it as Thorin shows that they are treated and considered as second class citizens
Not trusted to make a report about potential terrorists (even when reporting their own community)

As Long as the Bigoted mindset such as thorin's is allowed to influence which intelligence is treated seriously there will be more attacks in the Uk Obviously
One cannot Go about waging a crusade a demonizing and trying to isolate a community to the extent of Ignoring it when it identifies terrorists
.

And since 2 bigoted members have decide to Launch personal attacks rather than Answer the obvious question about the failing of the British intelligence community to act on firsthand knowledge of the terrorist I'm locking this thread.

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