The UK has not seen a bomb attack like the Manchester outrage since 2005 for three simple reasons:
For more than a decade, the BBC Home Affairs Unit has monitored every single terrorist incident, attempted or failed, that has made it into the public domain.
Quite simply, most of the people we have seen dragged through the courts are not capable of this kind of incident. Many aspire to “martyrdom” and talk about building bombs. But they are either, to be frank, too stupid and disorganised to turn their fantasies into reality or, alternatively, they get caught because they don’t know how to cover their tracks.
Most jihadists discount a bomb attack at the early stages: they realise that it’s too difficult to pull off. They might accidentally kill themselves while making the device.
Their purchasing patterns might raise suspicions in a local pharmacy or, online, prompt GCHQ to have a closer look at their digital life. They may turn to someone else for help who, unbeknown to both, is already on the MI5 radar. And so, as the 2013 killing of Fusilier Lee Rigby showed – four years to the day before the Manchester attack – most aspiring attackers opt for a different course.
Vehicles and knives became the weapons of choice. We saw it in 2014 when a London man planned a knife attack to coincide with the annual act of remembrance. We saw it again with the Khalid Masood Westminster attack.
But while knives and vehicles – and to a lesser extent guns – have featured in recent terrorism plots, there are people who still want to build bombs to attack crowded places.
Just recently, the younger brother of the man in the Remembrance Sunday incident pleaded guilty to trying to find bomb-making help – and one of his potential targets was an Elton John concert. So the big question for investigators is given that bomb-making requires expertise, how did the attacker get hold of such a device?
There are three possible sources:
He was taught how to make it
He taught himself
He was provided with the device by someone else
Sophisticated devices
If he was taught, this could point to someone who has returned from so-called Islamic State territory in Syria and Iraq. The militants have constructed devices involving the type of DIY shrapnel of metal nuts that has been reported from the scene at the Manchester Arena. Al-Qaeda and its offshoots have deployed those devices too.
It is less likely that it is someone recently returned from an al-Qaeda camp in Pakistan or Afghanistan as that’s a harder journey to make – but don’t rule it out.
Either way, these are sophisticated devices, particularly if made to a well-known recipe that is circulated among extremists. It takes engineering skill. Sometimes the process of making a bomb can’t easily be hidden. For instance, the 7/7 devices contained a chemical that bleached the hair of one of the bomb-makers. The fumes can kill plants. So if he taught himself, how did he go about it in complete secrecy?
Such an outcome would demonstrate how difficult it is to learn about a threat if the individual is acting entirely alone and taking exceptionally well planned precautions to avoid surveillance.
It’s not hard to find bomb-making plans online – don’t go looking, it’s an offence to possess this information – but many of them are useless.
So, again, the attacker would have spent a long time thinking and planning this – and that reduces the likelihood that he was acting entirely alone.
The third scenario is the worst-possible because it would point to an active bomb-making technician on the loose in the UK. Someone who is completely beneath the security services radar. Someone who has found ways of reaching out to potential recruits without compromising themselves. Someone who could strike again. That, of course, is quite a worrying prospect so it is worth stressing at this point that the official “threat level”, published by MI5, remains at “severe”. It has not been notched up to “critical”, which would that there is intelligence that an attack is “expected imminently”.
Vital Intelligence
The police believe they know the identity of the attacker – this is a very early breakthrough. It took days back in 2005 for the police to be sure who carried out the London attacks.
Right now inside Thames House, the home of MI5, and its regional units, a large post-incident operation will be under way. Officers, supported by GCHQ and where necessary counterparts in foreign agencies, will be examining any piece of intelligence to build a picture of the attacker and those around him.
The North West Counter Terrorism Unit, a joint team of MI5 and police officers, will be looking at anything they can glean from the attacker’s own devices. Search teams will identify addresses to search.
Experts from the national Forensic Explosives Laboratory in Kent will begin the astonishingly difficult work of recovering the remains of the device so they can reconstruct it. These scientists have performed this task on every bomb recovered in modern times.What they find may, in time, yield vital intelligence – such as the origins of the bomb recipe or its technical construction.Those details will in turn create new leads – perhaps linking the attacker to a specific group.It may take months for the full picture to emerge.
But first things first: the police will be racing to work out if this was a lone wolf or part of a cell that’s still out there.