MI5 is facing serious questions about whether it could have prevented the murder of Lee Rigby following revelations that the killers were known to the security service for several years and one was approached to become an informant.
As Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale were convicted of murder, details of what MI5 and the police knew about their extremist intent were under intense scrutiny. TThe Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) is investigating how much MI5 knew of the men’s activities, and whether iit failed to recognise the scale of the threat they posed.
The Guardian understands that both men were known to the security service for some time. They had featured on the periphery of several investigations over a number of years, but never as the main focus of the inquiry.
The men were among several thousand individuals in the UK whom the agency regards as active in some way in support of terrorism to varying degrees. Adebolajo claimed in court that MI5 had visited him at his flat in the months before the murder of Lee Rigby.
Previous knowledge of Adebolajo and Adebowale by MI5 raised the spectre of the 7 July bombings and the controversy about what MI5 knew about the ringleader, Mohammad Sidique Khan. It also puts pressure on the ISC to mount a robust inquiry. The committee was criticised for its 7 July investigation after it cleared the agency of failures only for the full details of MI5’s knowledge of Khan to emerge later, prompting renewed calls for a public inquiry into the London bombings.
Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the chair of the ISC, has said that MI5 has “serious questions to answer” regarding the Woolwich murder. These are likely to include when agents last made contact with Adebolajo. He had appeared on their radar as a suspected extremist and was apparently approached in an attempt to recruit him as an informant.
Adebolajo came to the attention of the authorities when he was arrested by the Kenyan police along with seven other young men in November 2010, during what the police said was an attempt to travel to Somalia to fight for al-Shabaab.
Adebolajo, who was born in Lambeth, south London to Nigerian parents, was suspected of masterminding the plan, which involved the seven – including two schoolboys – travelling to Lamu Island, 68 miles from the Somali border, and then by speedboat on to Kizingitini, Pate Island. But the group was arrested after a tipoff and taken into custody.
Adebolajo was eventually deported after he alleged he was tortured during his period in detention. The Kenyans have said they warned the British that he was a dangerous extremist. It has also emerged that there were apparent sightings of Adebolajo in October of that year at the Musa mosque in Mombasa, where the extremist cleric Sheikh Aboud Rogo preached weekly. Rogo was suspected of funding the group’s plan to join al-Shabaab.
On his return to the UK, Adebolajo’s family say, he was approached by the security service, which attempted to recruit him as an informant. Relatives also say they were approached. But the suspected extremist was not put under surveillance or considered a candidate for either a terrorism prevention and investigation measure (TPIM), or the Channel programme, which attempts to deradicalise individuals.
MI5 is likely to be asked to explain why Adebolajo was not followed up more intently on his return to the UK. About 50 Britons have gone to Somalia to fight since 2006, and another 50 have been intercepted and either stopped or dissuaded from travelling there, according to security assessments.
A few weeks before the Woolwich trial, Andrew Parker, the new MI5 chief, said being on the agency’s radar was “not the same as being under our microscope”.
Parker said that while there were many documented successes in disrupting terrorist plots directed against the UK from homegrown extremists, “as events have tragically shown, we can’t stop them all”.
He said there were several thousand Islamist extremists in the UK who saw the British people as a legitimate target who were known to MI5. But he a”.
dded: “There is the difference between knowing of someone and knowing everything about them.
This immediately risks conjuring the perhaps reasonable-seeming assumption that knowing who somebody is means MI5 then somehow knows everything about that person and can continually monitor their life. We cannot.
…”Knowing of an individual does not equate to knowing everything about them … The reality of intelligence work in practice is that we only focus the most intense intrusive attention on a small number of cases at any one time.”
Adebolajo was considered to be at the bottom of a pyramid of several thousand people on the security service radar. More intensive scrutiny, carried out with the necessary warrants and agreement of the home secretary, is only targeted at those people at the very top of the pyramid, where there is sufficient intelligence to justify it, the Guardian was told.
MI5 does not deny that Adebolajo was approached with the aim of recruiting him as an informant on his return from Kenya. Such approaches – the Guardian understands – are made to many of the thousands of extremists in the UK suspected of support for or involvement in terrorist causes.them as a source.
But in the case of Adebolajo the approaches of the authorities did not reap rewards. According to his family they could have done more harm than good – relatives have accused the security service of harassing him, putting him under intense pressure, and even of tipping him over into carrying out the horrific murder.
A spokesman for the ISC said of its inquiry: “As the chairman has said it is more important to get the right conclusion than to get a hurried conclusion. The ISC will produce its report as quickly as possible.”
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