UK: Manchester Arena jihad mass murderer not questioned by police when he flew in from Libya days before attack

Why was he even let back into the country from Libya, a jihadi hotspot, much less let in without being questioned? Because British officials’ first priority is not to appear “Islamophobic.”

“Arena bomber could have been ‘deterred’ from attack had he been stopped at Manchester Airport, MI5 officer admits,” by Paul Britton, Manchester Evening News, October 26, 2021:

Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi could have been ‘deterred’ from carrying out his murderous attack had he been stopped when he flew back into the country from Libya just days before he carried out the atrocity, a senior MI5 officer has accepted.

But the officer said at the time the security service had only ‘fragments of what we now know to be the picture’.

Pete Weatherby QC, for some families of victims, suggested at the public inquiry into the bombing on Tuesday that Abedi could have led MI5 or police directly to the bomb, had he been followed.

Stopping him at Manchester Airport on May 18, 2017, the QC suggested, would have alerted Abedi to the fact he was on the radar of police or MI5, and may have put him off carrying out the subsequent bombing.

‘Witness J’ – a senior MI5 officer giving evidence at the inquiry anonymously – has previously accepted it was an error not to have asked police to question Abedi on his return to the UK through use of a ‘port stop’.

At the time, the inquiry was told Abedi was one of 20,000 MI5 ‘closed subjects of interest’.

The inquiry has previously heard intelligence about Abedi received by MI5 in the months before the bombing was ‘not fully appreciated’ by the service at the time, but was later classed as being ‘highly relevant’ to the attack.

He then bought a SIM card for a mobile phone, caught a bus to Wythenshawe bus station then a taxi on to a flat complex in Rusholme, where components of the bomb had been stored in a car.

The QC suggested Abedi was carrying out ‘anti-surveillance measures’ and ‘going out of his way to avoid detection’.

Mr Weatherby asked Witness J: “If he had been stopped by the police, putting that together, there is a significant chance it would have stopped him from carrying out his plot?”

The witness replied: “Yes.”

But Witness J said following Abedi at that time would have involved police or MI5 running a ‘high priority investigation’ – the type of investigation reserved for ‘high priority targets’….