Several months before this terrorist blew himself up at the Ariana Grande concert, FBI agents are said to have to have informed British officials that the 22-year-old was part of a North African Islamic State cell based in the north west of England that was plotting an attack in the UK, according to a report in the Daily Mail.
The United States placed Abedi on a terror watchlist in 2016 after he came to the attention of intelligence agencies investigating terrorist groups operating out of Libya.
"In early 2017 the FBI told MI5 that Abedi belonged to a North African terror gang based in Manchester, which was looking for a political target in this country," a security source told The Mail.
"The information came from the interception of his communications by US federal agents, who had been investigating Abedi since the middle of 2016, and from information unearthed in Libya, where his family was linked to terrorist groups.
"Following this US tip-off, Abedi and other members of the gang were scrutinised by MI5. It was thought at the time that Abedi was planning to assassinate a political figure.
"But nothing came of this investigation and, tragically, he slipped down the pecking order of targets."
Naturally, authorities are claiming that the sheer volume of threats they monitor allowed for Abedi to slip through the cracks.
While that single excuse may work for this one warning, it does not excuse the multiple other warnings UK officials received about Abedi.
On top of the FBI reporting him, Abedi was reported to authorities for his terrorist intentions — not once, but twice — by his own family and friends. According to a report in the Times, his friends and family notified authorities of his terrorist intentions once this year, and once five years ago.
As the Times reports,
Abedi's support for terrorism was reported this year to the security services, and friends had called Britain's anti-terrorist hotline five years ago with concerns about his views, it was claimed. He was reported for violent statements, including a claim that being a suicide bomber was "OK".When we look closer at this situation, the intelligence apparatus not only looks incredibly inept but even complicit through neglect.
How many warnings does an agency need to have before they act on that information? There have been untold scores of individuals held in secret prisons across the world by Western intelligence agencies for their suspected role in terrorist activities. Many of them have been proven innocent, yet they couldn't nab Abedi?
To add even more fuel to the fire, Abedi has been linked to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a terror group that had been aided in the past by British Intelligence authorities.
Before returning to be a suicide bomber in Manchester, Abedi had been living in Libya.
As the Middle East Eye reports,
The British government operated an "open door" policy that allowed Libyan exiles and British-Libyan citizens to join the 2011 uprising that toppled Muammar Gaddafi even though some had been subject to counter-terrorism control orders, Middle East Eye can reveal.So, not only was MI5 warned on multiple occasions about the terrorist intentions of Salman Abedi, including a warning from the FBI, but it also appears that they let him travel freely back and forth to known terrorist hot spots and interact with known terrorist groups which the MI5 openly supported.
Several former rebel fighters now back in the UK told MEE that they had been able to travel to Libya with "no questions asked" as authorities continued to investigate the background of a British-Libyan suicide bomber who killed 22 people in Monday's attack in Manchester.
Salman Abedi, 22, the British-born son of exiled dissidents who returned to Libya as the revolution against Gaddafi gathered momentum, is also understood to have spent time in the North African country in 2011 and to have returned there on several subsequent occasions.
As innocent infants and elderly folks are patted down, groped and fondled in this facade of security, authorities were allowing a person with known terrorist intentions to move about freely until he blew himself up.
At best, this highlights the sheer incompetence of the Western police state and the entirely unnecessary expansion of the surveillance grid. At worst, it implicates Western authorities in the handling and support of a known terrorist — subsequently allowing him to murder innocent people. Either way, freedom loses and the state's brutal inadequacies shine through.
Comment: If true, several questions need to be answered: Who in MI5 received this information, on the UK side? Did these individuals let anyone else know, or sit on the information? Where did the chain of information-sharing break down? Whoever is responsible should be investigated and brought to justice, but that will never happen.
This may also account for how U.S. sources knew so quickly the identity of the attacker. Either they too were as complicit as MI5, or some agents sincerely thought they were doing a solid for their UK counterparts. That may also explain why they leaked the information: out of disdain for MI5's lack of action.
Meanwhile, Manchester police - who most likely were caught off guard by the attack, thanks to MI5, and are attempting to investigate the case to the best of their ability - are appealing to the public for more information: Maybe they should be appealing to MI5 for their complicity in this attack.
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