LONDON: Security services dismissed two pieces of intelligence that could have helped them prevent the Manchester attack, a major report has found.

David Anderson QC, the former Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, said he could not prove the attack would have be been stopped but that it “might have been averted had the cards fallen differently.”

MI5 received two separate leads in the months before Salman Abedi’s bombing at Manchester Arena that were assessed as not to be linked to terrorism, when in fact they were “highly relevant” to the planned attack.

“With the benefit of hindsight, the wrong conclusions were drawn,” Anderson told reporters at a briefing in London.

“Had people understood it in a different way, I think an investigation would have been opened into Salman Abedi, and who knows what it would have found.”

MI5’s internal assessment claimed that a new investigation would not have prevented the attack, but Anderson said it would have “plainly been preferable” to open a new probe into Abedi.

Abedi had already been put under active investigation twice — once over his contact with another subject of interest in 2014, when he was considered a “low residual risk,” and again in October 2015 because of indirect contact with Daesh figure in Libya.

MI5 also missed the opportunity to put a notice in on Abedi that would have triggered an alert when he tried to re-enter the UK from Libya four days before the bombing, and would have allowed him to be searched and questioned at the airport.

He was not the subject of a live investigation at the time, but the same report also showed London Bridge attack ringleader Khuram Butt had been under surveillance for almost two years.

Anderson said the “hardest question to answer” was how Butt managed to launch a terror attack while under surveillance on suspicion for planning one.

Police and the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to launch a separate investigation after he was filmed praying to an Isis flag during a television documentary on a prolific group of extremists, and believed his focus was moving away from terror attacks to travelling abroad.

The Independent