May 2017 Manchester UK bombing (split fm Religious/Extremist Terrorism: Non-Muslim edition)

[Fishbone Jones]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/25/loose-lipped-americans-cannot-allowed-put-counter-terrorist/

Now, if I remember correctly, I had a Top Secret clearance as a young, and newly joined, subbie long ago and far away.

I also recall that there were some really intriguing levels above mine of which I heard rumours.  Things like Cosmic and Ultra and ....  Kind of like being informed that you have your Third Degree and thinking you are top of the heap only to find their are 30 more degrees behind the curtain.

If previous administrations have "discounted" Top Secret to bargain basement status is it too much to expect that a newer, higher classification, with a much narrower distribution, might be in the offing?

29 if York 

 

[Jarnhamar]

It appears once again people  aware  of one of these  psychos were too afraid to 'say something' for fear of character assassination and being branded racist. Sounds like the police were aware of shit too but probably  operating under the same concerns.

 

[daftandbarmy]

It appears once again people  aware  of one of these  psychos were too afraid to 'say something' for fear of character assassination and being branded racist. Sounds like the police were aware of crap too but probably  operating under the same concerns.

My guess is that the UK police are tracking hundreds of similar 'psychos' in the UK right now. Figuring out who's going to 'go hot' tomorrow is always a lottery. Of course, one of the aims of the terrorist is to make this guessing game so difficult that the country abandons the 'habeas corpus' principle and, in frustration, resorts to mass internment. Which gives them even more opportunities to convert the disgruntled interned to their cause.

 

[jollyjacktar]

Plenty of room in the Dartmoor for interment.  I'm sure the 3k they're worried about would fit nicely.

 

[Kat Stevens]

I'm sure there must be one or two uninhabited rocks in the Outer Hebrides, or better yet, Orkney that could accommodate.

 

[Journeyman]

It appears once again people  aware  of one of these  psychos were too afraid to 'say something' for fear of character assassination and being branded racist. Sounds like the police were aware of shit too but probably  operating under the same concerns.

Slight  tangent, but I can't be too demanding of the police.

Closer to home, Martin Couture-Rouleau's father had gone to the police before the killing of WO Vincent in 2014.  Police helped organize a de-radicalization effort, which included direct confrontation explaining the laws and consequences, and engaging the local imam to assist.  They sought a peace bond against Couture-Rouleau that was rejected by the Public Prosecution service.  They did get his passport revoked.

The RCMP stated that they believed they were making progress.  They did all they could against a "known person of interest," within Canadian laws as they stood at the time.  The Anti-Terrorism Act (2015) amended some of those laws, but at the end of the day the Charter of Fights and Freedoms still takes precedence.


Now, I certainly don't know the background details of the UK attack, but until shown otherwise, I'm hesitant to dump it on the Manchester police.  I suspect that until Salman Abedi crossed that actual threshold of violence, the police faced similar constraints.


I'm not a jihadi apologist;  I'm certainly  not a lawyer;  I have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express or two....

 

[The Bread Guy]

Standing down a bit ...

Britain's Ministry of Defense has announced an end to its week-long deployment to help police cope with an increased threat of an extremist attack after the Manchester concert bombing.

Chief of the Defense Staff Stuart Peach said Thursday that roughly 1,000 military personnel had been deployed along with police as the terrorist threat was raised to "critical" after the attack that killed 22 people and injured dozens more.

The official threat level has been lowered from "critical" — the highest level, meaning an attack may be imminent — to "severe," which means the government believes an attack is highly likely ...

Meanwhile, via Libyan media ...

The Libyan cleric, Abdelbasit Ghwaila, who was for some time an Imam at an Ottawa mosque in Canada, has denied ties to the Libyan-British bomber of Manchester Arena, Salman Abedi, defying all those who accused him with links to Abedi to come out with their evidence.

In an interview with the Libyan Express, cleric Ghwaila said that he asks those who accused him of being in connection with Manchester bomber to say to the public where, when and how they both met.

“Is there any photos, phone calls, social media communication? Let them come out with it. My challenge stands.” Ghwaila said on Wednesday.

“I am a media figure. I have my own program on a local Libyan TV, I always denounce and condemn the radicalism of IS everywhere in the world and TV records can prove that.” He explained.

Ghwaila indicated that he is always accused of such links to terror and especially to Benghazi ongoing conflict, adding that such accusations are untrue and his stance on Benghazi is that military forces want to take it under control by force.

“They want to conduct a coup on February Revolution and bring Libya back to the oppression and backwardness. It is all done by a Libyan captive in Chad war, Khalifa Haftar, an ignorant stupid person.” Ghwaila added ...

 

[The Bread Guy]

From the New York Times, shared under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-42) ...

Manchester Bomber Met With ISIS Unit in Libya, Officials Say

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI and ERIC SCHMITTJUNE 3, 2017

The bomber who killed 22 people at a pop concert in Manchester, England, last month had met in Libya with members of an Islamic State unit linked to the November 2015 Paris terrorist attack, according to current and retired intelligence officials.

The content of the communications between the attacker, Salman Abedi, and the terrorist cell remains unknown. But the possibility that he was directed or enabled by Islamic State operatives in Libya, as opposed to Syria, suggests that even as the group’s Middle East base is shrinking, at least one of its remote franchises is developing ways to continue attacks within Europe.

On visits to Tripoli as well as to the coastal Libyan town of Sabratha, Mr. Abedi met with operatives of the Katibat al-Battar al-Libi, a core Islamic State unit that was headquartered in Syria before some of its members dispersed to Libya.

Originally made up of Libyans who had gone to Syria to fight in the civil war, the unit became a magnet for French and Belgian foreign fighters, and several were dispatched to carry out attacks abroad. Some of the terrorist group’s most devastating hits in Europe, including the coordinated attack in Paris in 2015, were shaped by alumni of the brigade.

The contacts between Mr. Abedi and Battar members occurred when he went to Libya, especially in Tripoli and Sabratha, according to a retired European intelligence chief, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the case. The former official added that Mr. Abedi kept up contact with the group after returning to Manchester, his hometown.

When Mr. Abedi was in Britain, the contacts would sometimes happen by phone, the retired official said. If the content of the call was sensitive, Mr. Abedi used phones that were disposable, or dispatches were sent from Libya by his contacts to his “friend” — living in Germany or Belgium — who then sent it to Mr. Abedi in Britain, according to the former intelligence chief.

Mr. Abedi’s contacts with the Battar brigade members in Libya — though not the details of the methods used to communicate or the specific locations — were confirmed by a senior United States intelligence official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Both officials said that Mr. Abedi’s activities in Libya remained the focus of intensive investigations.

The leaders of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, have been actively coordinating with loyalists in Libya since at least the start of 2015, sending personnel back from Syria to help them establish their fledgling colony. Their Libyan province, headquartered in the port city of Surt, grew to become their most important outside of Iraq and Syria.

After nearly two years, the Libyan branch recently lost ground, with its forces routed from more than 100 miles of coastline. But no one believes the group has been destroyed there — instead it has dispersed, while maintaining its operational abilities.

The Battar brigade was formed by Libyan fighters who were seasoned veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. It was among the first foreign jihadist contingent to arrive in Syria in 2012, as the country’s popular revolt was sliding into a broader civil war and Islamist insurgency, said Cameron Colquhoun, formerly a senior counterterrorism analyst at Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, its surveillance and intelligence agency.

“One of the things I remember from my time is the fact that some of the baddest dudes in Al Qaeda were Libyan,” he said, citing a study of seized Qaeda personnel files by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, showing that as far back as 2007, almost 20 percent of the terrorist group’s fighters in Iraq were from Libya.

“When I looked at the Islamic State, the same thing was happening,” said Mr. Colquhoun, who now runs Neon Century, a corporate intelligence consultancy in London. “They were the most hard-core, the most violent — the ones always willing to go to extremes when others were not. The Libyans represented the elite troops, and clearly ISIS capitalized on this.”

Soon, the Battar brigade’s battlefield reputation began attracting newcomers, especially from a pipeline of recruits sent by Sharia4Belgium, a group in Brussels that lured numerous Belgian as well as French men to the cause. One was the son of a Moroccan shopkeeper who had moved to Belgium, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the future commander of the Paris attacks. Units like Battar al-Libi became the Islamic State’s shock troops, specializing in the use of assault rifles and suicide belts or vests as they overrun positions. They fight as long as they can, then aim to set off their explosives at some critical spot or when they cannot go on, as happened at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris.

Mr. Colquhoun believes that it was inside the Battar brigade that Mr. Abaaoud was introduced to the techniques he later unleashed on civilians in Paris.

Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a researcher at the Middle East Forum who maintains an archive of original Islamic State documents, said that the Libyan brigade was an important fighting contingent. But after the Islamic State declared it was founding a caliphate in 2014, the unit was dissolved, as the ISIS leadership began trying to prevent the rise of battalions based on nationality or ethnicity.

Although it had been disbanded, the network the group had established survived. “Some personnel at least went back to Libya, helping to cultivate what would become I.S.’s Libyan provinces,” Mr. Tamimi wrote in an email. “Some may also play a role as ‘external plotters’ based out of Libya.”

Mr. Colquhoun, in his research, said he discovered that the returning Libyans established training camps where they taught bomb-making and weapons use, and they opened an “operations room” for terror activities. Their duties included guarding high-level Islamic State leaders as well as teams conducting targeted assassinations, he said.

They also began launching terrorist strikes in the region, including attacks in 2015 on a beach in Sousse, Tunisia, and the Bardo National Museum in Tunis that killed a total of 60 people, many of them foreign tourists.

An investigation later indicated that the perpetrators in the two attacks in Tunisia had trained in the same Islamic State camp in Libya in Sabratha, the same city that Mr. Abedi is believed to have visited to meet members of the Battar brigade.

“Most of the blood spilled in Europe in the more spectacular attacks, using guns and bombs, really all began at the time when Katibat al-Battar went back to Libya,” Mr. Colquhoun said. “That is where the threat trajectory to Europe began — when these men returned to Libya and had breathing space. While they were targeted by drones, the opposition they faced there was not as intense as in Syria.”

After the Sousse and Bardo attacks, the first time that a direct connection was found between Libya and an attack in Europe was in December, when a 23-year-old named Anis Amri rammed a container truck into holiday shoppers in Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz, killing 12.

Two Libyan phone numbers were found on his phone, and a subsequent investigation discovered that he had traded Telegram messages with those numbers. Germany’s BND intelligence agency linked the Libyan numbers to the Islamic State, according to another report by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center ...

More @ link

 

[mariomike]

22 people killed and 512 injured inside the arena.

How many Paramedics do you need?

Three.

5 Nov. 2017
BBC

"Treatment delayed" for bomb victims.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-41838579

 

[mariomike]

26 March 2018

"An official report, published today, is expected to level strong criticism at the emergency services' response, as survivors demand changes to the way they deal with future atrocities."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5546759/Manchester-Arena-victims-treated-just-THREE-paramedics.html?ito=social-twitter_dailymailUK

 

[mariomike]

Firefighter Union is demanding more money for its Firefighters before it agrees to be called to rescue casualties from the scene of a massacre.

QUOTE

31 Mar 2018

Militant union blocks plan to put firemen on terror front line after fierce criticism in Manchester atrocity inquiry
The Fire Brigades Union is now demanding more money for its members
Fire brigades now rely on volunteers and senior officers to man specialist teams
Comes after last week's criticial report into the Manchester Arena atrocity
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5565993/Militant-union-blocks-plan-firemen-terror-line.html#ixzz5BObKVWCX

END QUOTE

 

[winnipegoo7]

In today's news:

Act of betrayal: Manchester bomber was rescued by the Royal Navy from Libyan warzone and evacuated back to Britain - three years before he slaughtered 22 people at a pop concert

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6008369/Manchester-bomber-rescued-Royal-Navy-Libyan-warzone-evacuated-Britain.html