It won't be an understatement if someone says the British security establishment has failed the state, and the world, for that matter. A day after the Islamist terrorists drove a hired van into pedestrians on the London bridge killing seven people, the investigators have come back with an all too familiar story.
After identifying Khuram Shazad and Rachid Redouane as two of the perpetrators of the carnage near River Thames, the security establishment revealed that at least one of them had known terror affiliations, if not direct links.
Butt, the 27-year-old Pakistan-born terrorist, was indeed "known" to MI5, which handles internal security. The assailant was radicalised to the hilt and appeared in a TV documentary featuring British terrorists, The Jihadist Next Door. He had plans to go to Syria to wage his holy war of killing. He had appeared at least twice at events held by ultra hard-line preachers.
The Telegraph said in a report that the jihadi cancelled his Syria plans as his wife was pregnant at that time. He then conveniently chose the London Bridge rather, to earn his passage to the other world that offers virgins as the gift for killing.
MI5 data overload or abject failure?
The Metropolitan Police has curiously said, after the fact, of course, that Butt was "known to MI5" but not believed to be part of any attack. Seriously!
Would that happen in India? Would that happen in Singapore? Would such a high-risk suspect be allowed to get on with his terror plans in any other country? When terror strikes the western capitals -- the flag-bearers of liberal values -- at will, the rest of the world has a queasy, creepy feeling. More often than not, people's forebodings turn true when they hear from intelligence bigwigs that the terrorist was under the scanner but was let off for want of solid evidence.
Like it happened this time around, soon we are told the attacker was a person of interest, a known threat or had once gone through internal security rigmaroles.
That's a pansy variety anti-terror ops -- and that doesn't have to be an understatement. Someone appearing in the secret meetings of an ultra hard-line group that calls for the Sharia takeover of Britain and declares the black flag of Isis will be hoisted over Downing Street is a threat to national security. If MI5 doesn't appreciate that fact, they have just failed the country, and the rest of the world indeed.
Would this sort of thing happen in an average Asian country that has lived through mindless terror attacks? Will it even happen in the so-called quasi-functional nation states in the boondocks? In any country that has a no-nonsense approach to national security?
Would you fly the Isis flag and then be allowed to openly participate in ultra hard-line propaganda meetings? This jihadi's spiritual guru was arrested in 2014 for terror links. His outfit, al-Muhajiroun, had links to al–Qaeda and he was deemed as one of the preachers who had influenced the killing of British soldier Lee Rigby.
Yet Khurram Butt was allowed to take care of childbirth at home before unleashing a bloody carnage in the heart of London, a city that welcomed his refugee family and, understandably, offered generous financial aid all along.
Counter-terror apparatus is just out of its depths
Prime Minister May says the terror methods have evolved and changed. That's a banal fact. The honest admission she should have made was that the British security and counter-terror apparatus is just out of its depths.
On Tuesday, the Met defended its decision to drop the investigation into the would-be attacker back in 2015. They say there wasn't enough evidence. And that lapse has cost the lives of several people. People had placed calls to the anti-terror cell and had gone to local police station fearing this man would be dangerous.
Singapore Home Minister had something interesting to say here. "Britain has long allowed extremist preachers who have poisoned many Muslims, and Britain did so under the framework of freedom of speech," K Shanmugam told the Channel News Asia. He was forthright when he said the legal tools available to UK's security agencies are "relatively limited" owing to the sensitivities around the extension of state powers.
The freedom threshold, of course, varies from country to country. However, the will to exist as a nation state and protect the people is one overriding theme in most countries of the world. In the UK, there is a pervasive death-wish, instead.
Salman Abedi, the suicide bomber who killed 22 people at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester on May 22, had also been clearly flagged up for terror suspicion. People had called anti-terrorism hotline alerting police that this young man had openly expressed support for terrorism and boasted that he was okay with "being a suicide bomber. Records showed he had recently returned from Libya.
Most countries have far more stringent ways of monitoring terror sympathisers who return from places like Syria, Yemen and Libya.
Now, what about the UK parliament attacker Khalid Masood? The MI5 had investigated him in 2010, treating him as a "peripheral figure". His associates were later convicted of plotting a bomb attack on an Army base in Luton. However, the British security establishment did not find him risky at all!
Under May as home secretary, the police and intelligence establishment saw budget cuts and staff reduction. And she says the terror operatives have gone hi-tech. But these are dispensable math and minor details. The fact is that terrorists are making merry when the system is doomed by its own sophistries and equivocations.
