Commentary: Why were Abedi clan’s jihadi links overlooked for so long?

With three members of Salman Abedi’s immediate family now under arrest in Manchester and Tripoli, accused variously of IS affiliation and planning further bomb attacks, the clan’s long and deep roots in jihadi violence in Europe, Africa, Iraq and Syria are now becoming plain.

The surprise is that Britain and allied counter-terror agencies didn’t pick this up, or at least didn’t seem to take the Abedi clan as a serious threat.

The question is whether this has been a failure of intelligence gathering and surveillance, or of evaluation and analysis — or a combination of both.

In Manchester the extreme views of Salman were flagged up by two youth workers five years ago, He was heard to praise suicide bombers — a habit he continued when briefly at Salford University.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd said the authorities — meaning MI5 and the Home Office — had been aware of Salman “up to a point”. In other words he was not regarded as a threat — a person of “no particular significance” in security jargon.

Given what has emerged in Tripoli and Dusseldorf this seems almost astonishing. German intelligence has traced him to radical Dusseldorf cells where Tunisian Anis Amri was set on the path to murdering 11 in the Berlin Christmas market attack last year.

German intelligence reports that Salman flew to Germany a number of times from Manchester, and may have received final preparation there for the attack on the concert. He flew from Germany just four days before.

The Germans also believe he may have gone from their country to Syria where he received weapons and explosives training. Yet he appeared on no German terrorist watch list.

Yesterday his younger brother Hashem, 20, and his father Ramadan, 57, were detained by the Special Deterrence Force (Rada), the most powerful militia supporting the UN-backed Government of National Accord in Tripoli. Rada spokesman Ahmed Bin Salem said Hashem was involved with IS and was thought to be involved in a terror campaign in Tripoli. Hashem is said to have been in close touch with Salman and to have discussed the attack on the Manchester Arena with him.

Ramadan’s story makes the claim that he and his clan were of no special significance particularly implausible. In the Eighties he is said to have joined the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (he denied being part of it yesterday) which opposed Colonel Gaddafi.

The group grew up alongside al Qaeda and produced fighters for Afghanistan, who would have been trained with Bin Laden’s men.

So why was the Abedi clan and its network in south Manchester overlooked? They spawned one of the most effective terrorist bombmakers of recent times.