Britain needs more manpower to increase counter-terror operations and spread them to every major city
Keeping watch
SALMAN Abedi was on the security services’ radar. Yet he slaughtered 22 people.
Khalid Masood was investigated by MI5. Then he killed five in Westminster.
Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale were monitored — before they butchered Lee Rigby four years ago.
All were considered “peripheral figures” not among the small hardcore of fanatics most likely to strike and most closely watched.
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With police resources limited, all had enough freedom to plot and execute carnage.
There’s an obvious lesson.
We must have more manpower, more pairs of eyes, to watch more extremists more of the time in more places.
The Sun is reluctant to criticise the security services who have admirably foiled so many previous plots.
It takes 25 to 30 officers to monitor one suspect 24/7 and there are hundreds of suspects.
But what can Britain do except increase counter-terror operations and spread them to every major city?
It was Manchester on Monday . . . anywhere could be next.
It has to be done. Money must be found.
There were 22 victims this week — almost inevitably there will be more.
We cannot afford to throw up our hands at the scale of the task.
We can never be entirely safe, but a Government’s first duty is its people’s security and we can surely be safer than we are.
On Abedi, there are critical questions.
First, why are we learning crucial details of his movements and his attack via leaks to American newspapers from US intelligence?
Is it because they place a much greater value than our police on the public’s right to know?
Second, an imam and others at his local mosque knew Abedi was an ISIS sympathiser.
Did they report him? If not, why not? If so, what did police do?
Third, Abedi went to Libya and possibly Syria before the massacre.
Why was he not held at the border as he returned?
Indeed why are ANY British IS jihadis or suspects allowed to return?
It is time they were stopped.
Terror online
IT is meant to be hard to build a bomb. But Google makes it a lot easier.
How appalling that, with a simple search, a Sun reporter found deadly instructions for terrorists, one written by Osama Bin Laden’s explosives chief.
Google insists it takes “these issues extremely seriously” and removes such content as soon as it is flagged. That’s not nearly good enough. The Sun exposed this material in seconds.
Why, with all its vast staff and advanced software, isn’t Google policing it full-time?