It was Manchester’s darkest hour. But could it have been stopped?

Dear readers — since the tragic events of May 22, 2017, when a terror attack on the Manchester Arena during an Ariana Grande concert claimed 22 lives, the families of the victims have been grappling with a key question: was the attack preventable? It’s a question that’s been pored over in hours of inquiries as well as reports examining the role played by Britain’s leading intelligence and security agencies. 

For the past year David Collins, the northern editor of The Times, has been sitting down with the family of one of the victims — eight year old Saffie-Rose Roussos — to tell the story of the attack, and its aftermath, through their eyes. In today’s Mill, David examines what MI5 really knew about the motivations of the arena attacker, Salman Abedi, in the lead-up to the attack, including the role of one of the country’s most senior spies. It’s a fascinating if difficult read, and at the bottom we’ve included the details if you wish to pre-order David’s book. 

Your briefing

💔 The families of victims of the Manchester Arena bombing have expressed their disbelief after one of the bombers was able to carry out an attack on prison officers on Saturday. In a letter seen by the BBC, the families of Liam Curry, Chloe Rutherford, Megan Hurley, Eilidh MacLeod and Kelly Brewster described the attack by Hashem Abedi, brother of Salman Abedi, as “beyond comprehension”, and urged that he “should not have access to anything that he can weaponise” in the future. The letter was sent to Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood on Monday, and since then inmates of separation centres – which hold inmates deemed dangerous or extremist – have been barred from using kitchens. Spokesperson to Keir Starmer described how things had clearly gone “terribly wrong” with the way Abedi was handled in HMP Frankland.

🪦 Southern Cemetry in Chorlton has been named among the Telegraph’s list of Britain’s best attractions that people have never heard of. The south Manchester graveyard comes first in a list of 12 locations, which also includes the Thames Path in London, and Castle Acre in Norfolk. Writer Cathy Toogood says of the cemetery – which functions as a resting place for John Rylands, Tony Wilson, and LS Lowry among others – that its “grand avenues of beech and plane trees, plus wildflower areas [...] make it a lovely place to stroll”. Southern Cemetery is the largest municipal cemetery in the UK, and has recently become Manchester’s newest nature reserve.

🍞 And a viral Tiktok star who retains anonymity by hiding her face behind a slice of bread has recently been enjoying global fame thanks to five parking spaces on Collier Street, Castlefield. In a video published on Saturday, Zoë Bread showed how the council had placed signs directing parkers to pay at a private parking meter rather than the council’s own — causing drivers to pay for a parking ticket, and still get fined by the council. The content creator claims the signs were deliberately misleading, as the council earns through the fines, and the private parking company earns through the tickets, with only drivers remaining out of pocket. "I have a lot of time to go investigate things," she told the BBC. Cllr for the area Alan Good has since told the BBC that, after visiting the street in question, he believes that the parking fines allocated due to confusion should be “recinded”, and that the council “can take a bit more of a human and more of a common sense approach to parking enforcement”.

It was Manchester’s darkest hour. But could it have been stopped?

By David Collins

Last week, news broke from HMP Frankland; a category A Men’s prison in Durham nicknamed the “Monster Mansion” that previously has held prisoners including Peter Sutcliffe and Charles Bronson. Hashem Abedi, who was being held in a separation centre — designed for prisoners who are seen as dangerous and extremist, had managed to gain access to kitchen equipment. It was understood that Abedi was being held in a confinement cell for 23 hours a day — his meals served through a hatch. But somehow, using hot cooking oil and improvised blades, he was able to attack three security guards, one of whom suffered third degree burns.

Hashem Abedi is currently serving a minimum 55 year sentence for his role in the 2017 Manchester Arena attacks, carried out by his brother Salman Abedi. The men, both radicalised Islamists, had built a powerful bomb which was detonated in the foyer of the arena after an Ariana Grande concert, claiming 22 lives.

The recent prison attack, about which the families of the victims described their “absolute disbelief”, brought renewed attention to a case that has never really lost it in the past eight years — one of the most shocking terror attacks the UK has ever seen. 

For the past year I’ve been sitting down with the Roussos family for a book entitled Saffie, named after Saffie-Rose Roussos, aged just eight when she died. The book follows the family before, during and after the attack, and running through my research has been a key question: could the loss of life have been prevented?

“What did MI5 really know about Abedi?” Andrew, Saffie’s father, would often tell me. “And could they have stopped the attack from happening? I don’t think we ever got the full truth out of MI5. I think they’ve been hiding that truth from the very beginning.”

On the night of the attack, May 22, 2017, Andrew was sitting in a car outside the Manchester Arena7, waiting to pick up his wife, Lisa, Saffie, and Ashlee, Lisa’s 25-year-old daughter from another marriage. Beside him was his 11-year-old son, Xander. Andrew checked his watch. 10.30pm. Xander’s Nintendo Switch was beeping in the background. The car radio was on low volume playing chart music. Everything was fine. Everything was normal. His family was fine. His life was normal.

At 10.31pm, Andrew and Xander heard an almighty bang ring out across the city centre. It pulsed through their bodies. “Something had exploded,” he said. “That’s what is sounded like. Then there were kids screaming, running past the car. My heart was beating so fast. It was like being at the start of a disaster movie, the bit just before you see what the monster is.” A bomb had gone off, and Lisa, Saffie and Ashlee were nowhere to be seen.

Lisa and Saffie, it turned out, were four metres from the bomb when it exploded. Saffie died from her injuries. Ashlee was further away from the blast-zone and survived. Lisa woke up from a coma after eight days with severe injuries to find out about Saffie. Their story, however, is not only a tragic one. It is also one of hope and inspiration, as they fought for justice at a public inquiry to learn more about MI5, and whether it could have stopped the arena bomb.

The UK government announced a public inquiry into the arena attack in 2019, which delivered its final report four years later. It would hear evidence from family members, police officers, paramedics, firefighters and security guards. It would also hear from one of Britain’s most senior spies.

Witness J, as he must be known for legal and security purposes, was a senior MI5 officer close to the very top of the organisation, having first visited Manchester in October 2021. He was the sort of person you might walk past him in the street and not give a second glance.

He would describe his job, in his own words, as being like a “spider at the centre of a web”. His identification could see him or his family members targeted by terrorists or a hostile nation, such as Russia or China. Even the staff working at the inquiry, based in an adapted room at Manchester Magistrates’ Court, would not know his name or identifying details.

He entered the inquiry room by a non-public route. The hearing room was cleared and the secure camera feed into the courtroom was switched off. All electronic devices in the main hearing room had to be switched off except for the devices used by the official transcribers in the room and those needed for the inquiry’s document management system.

Witness J’s evidence marked the beginning of the inquiry’s look at whether the arena attack could and should have been prevented by the authorities. He was also cross-examined by Andrew and Lisa's barrister, Pete Weatherby, as they tried to reveal more of the truth about the chances to stop the attack. 

At the inquiry, Witness J was sworn in.  “Are you the witness who will be known as Witness J during the course of these proceedings?” asked the inquiry's lead counsel.

 “Yes, I am.”

“Have you been employed by MI5 for a period of now nearly 30 years?”

“Yes, I have.”

Witness J told the room he was currently director of the counter-terrorism section of MI5. He said leading up to the bomb had been a period of unprecedented demand with 3000 active subjects on its radar, and 20,000 “closed subjects of interest”, in other words, people who had been previously investigated – a combined figure roughly equipment to the population of a small town, such as Reigate, Ascot or Newquay.

A regional assessment of Manchester had been carried out in 2010. It had found a high level of discontentment within some Muslim communities across the city, which might influence the area’s susceptibility to extremism. Many of them were young men whose parents had fled Colonel Gaddafi in Libya in the 90s, to be taken in by the UK. They had settled in south Manchester, in an area known by some as “Little Tripoli”.

It was that same year, on 30 December 2010, that MI5 first received information about Salman Abedi. It was shortly before his 16th birthday. MI5 was watching a particular subject of interest – who cannot be named – and Abedi had shared an address with that same person. He came to the attention of the organisation several more times between 2010 and 2017, mixing with various extremists. He was even in contact with a convicted extremist who he would visit in Belmarsh Prison and Liverpool Prison. The pair had communicated regularly on the phone, sharing more than 1,000 text messages. In the text messages there were references to martyrdom, the maidens of paradise, and a senior figure within Al-Qaeda. Then, shortly before the arena attack, MI5 received intelligence about Abedi which should have been a game-changer.

Witness J said that on two separate occasions in the months prior to the attack, MI5 received intelligence about Salman Abedi. “At the time it was assessed to relate not to terrorism but to possible non-nefarious or to non-terrorist criminality on the part of Salman Abedi,” according to his testimony.

In other words, MI5 thought Abedi could be up to no good, but he wasn’t a terrorist. Sir John Saunders, the inquiry chairman, would see those pieces of intelligence behind closed doors, due to national security reasons. Before the attack, Abedi was part of something called the “Clematis Process”, which was a trawl by MI5 through the pool of 20,000 former suspects to see if they were re-engaged in terrorism. Abedi was one of 685 people being looked at again. 

What’s more, MI5 officers were scheduled to have a meeting about Abedi. The meeting was penned in for nine days after the bomb, but never happened. Abedi flew into Manchester Airport on May 18. He had been referred as part of the Clematis Process, yet no ports action had been placed on him, and so he was not flagged at the border at Manchester Airport. The inquiry would eventually find that there was a good chance that if Abedi was stopped at the airport, a search would have revealed a trigger device on his person. Finding that device – or following him from the airport to a car where he was storing the bomb – might have stopped the attack.

MI5 has stations based in various locations around the UK, outside of its headquarters in London, all working to disrupt and prevent terror attacks. The Northwest Station was one of its busiest. Counter-terrorism police officers are also based there, working side by side with MI5 staff. In May 2017, their computer systems for sharing information were clunky and outdated.

Intelligence was falling through the gaps. In April 2017, a month before the attack, the investigative team based at the station went into “amber” on its workload dashboard. This meant it was in a period of stress and high demand. Work had to be distributed to some of the other regional teams. My research can reveal that some of the Northwest Station’s investigations had to be suspended in order to keep up. By May 2017 the Northwest Station was receiving assistance from other parts of MI5, but the benefit of that assistance had not yet been felt. 

One piece of research by counter-terrorism police the year before was also causing concern in intelligence circles. It examined travellers from Manchester to Libya over a period of three months, looking at fighting age boys and men aged 16 to 30 years. The outcome was that there were 544 such individuals. Counter-terrorism policing was engaging with mosques in south Manchester, but Didsbury Mosque did not respond positively to the contact, according to one senior police officer. It was the same mosque attended by the Abedi family.

But what about those two pieces of intelligence? What was that intelligence, exactly? A warning from a source at Didsbury mosque? A tip-off from one of Abedi’s friends? Or had MI5 managed to intercept some communications which hinted at what was to come? Maybe some clue about the chemical purchases on Amazon? It remains a mystery, which endures to this day.

In March 2023, Sir John Saunders published his third and final report. “I have found a significant missed opportunity to take action that might have prevented the attack,” he told the country’s waiting media at a press conference. “It is not possible to reach any conclusion on the balance of probabilities or to any other evidential standard as to whether the attack would have been prevented. However, there was a realistic possibility that actionable intelligence could have been obtained which might have led to action preventing the attack. The reason for this missed opportunity included a failure by the security service, in my view, to act swiftly enough.”

Sir John had interviewed Witness C under oath – an MI5 officer who personally handled the Abedi intelligence – who said they had believed at the time the information had “national security significance”. In other words, possible terrorist activity. But the information had not been acted on quickly enough. This was not the story given by Witness J.

“It became apparent,” Sir John found, “that the security service’s corporate position did not reflect what those officers did, thought or would have done at the material time.” MI5 was caught out. The spider in the web had been exposed.

Saffie: The Youngest Victim of the Manchester Terror Attack and her Family's Fight for Justice, by David Collins (Silvertail books £12.99, Kindle £2.99) is published on April 24, available for pre-order on Amazon now.