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Britain to Consider New Security Powers After Attack on Soldier
Britain to Consider New Security Powers After Attack on Soldier
(about 7 hours later)
LONDON — A government minister said Friday that the police and the security services would face inquiries into their previous handling of two men accused of hacking a British soldier to death on a busy London street two days ago.
LONDON — Pressure mounted on Friday for MI5, Britain’s domestic security agency, to explain how two men with years of involvement with extremist Islamic groups were left free to kill an off-duty soldier this week, striking him with their car in a London suburb and then hacking him repeatedly with butchers’ cleavers.
British security officials confirmed Thursday that the suspects were known to MI5, the domestic security agency, in the years before the attack, which stunned many people with its sheer brutality.
For its sheer brutality, and the fact that the episode was recorded in detail by witnesses with cellphone cameras, the attack outside the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich on Wednesday came as a shock to many in Britain after years of success by MI5 and other security agencies in tracking militant cells and pre-empting terrorist plots.
Eric Pickles, the communities minister, said on Friday that the killing would prompt the authorities to debate measures to forestall similar threats in the future.
On Friday, officials confirmed the identity of the second of the two suspects, naming him as Michael Adebowale, 22, who was born in Nigeria and immigrated to Britain as a child. The other man had previously been identified as Michael Adebolajo, 28, who was born in Britain to a Christian family that moved here from Nigeria, and converted to Islam after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“I think it’s probably too soon to assess the powers we need,” Mr. Pickles said in a radio interview. “But, once the investigation is through, both aspects of the security services and aspects of the policing of these two individuals will be thoroughly investigated and no doubt recommendations will come out of that.”
Both men survived police gunshot wounds sustained after the death of Lee Rigby, 25, a bandsman and machine-gunner in the Royal Fusiliers, when witnesses said they charged at police officers with cleavers and a handgun. They remain under armed police guard in London hospitals and have not yet been charged with any offense.
Mr. Pickles was responding to a question about whether legislation to permit more intrusive electronic surveillance, known by its critics as the “snoopers’ charter,” might have prevented the attacks. “I know of nothing that would suggest that provisions that were in that bill would have made any difference in this case or would have saved the life of the young member of the armed forces,” Mr. Pickles said.
The possibility of wider involvement in the attack was suggested by the arrests of two women and a man believed to have family links to Mr. Adebolajo, though the women were released without being charged on Friday and only the man, said by the police to be 29 years old, remained in custody.
On a cellphone video recorded by a passer-by after the assault, one of the suspects, hands bloody, says he killed the soldier to protest the killing of Muslims by British soldiers overseas, presumably in Afghanistan.
Officials confirmed Friday that the two suspects in the killing had been known to MI5 for years, and in the case of Mr. Adebolajo, since at least 2005. While there were few details about the militant activities of Mr. Adebowale, Mr. Adebolajo has a long record of involvement with extremist groups, according to security officials. Those activities, they said, included involvement in violent protests and an arrest at a London airport last year when, according to reports in British newspapers that quoted security officials, he was preparing to fly to Somalia to join the Shabaab, a group linked to Al Qaeda that has been listed as a terrorist group by Britain and the United States.
The attack, in the southeast London neighborhood of Woolwich, prompted fears of sectarian tensions, which religious leaders sought on Friday to avert with public appeals and condemnation of the attack. Standing with Christian and Muslim leaders, the Most Rev. Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Church of England, declared, “This is very much a time for communities to come together.”
On Friday, British newspapers published photographs of Mr. Adebolajo at several protests organized by extremist Islamic groups in recent years, including an image showing him at a London protest in 2007 standing behind Anjem Choudary, leader of Al Muhajiroun, an extremist group that was banned in 2010.
Ibrahim Mogra, the assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, called the soldier’s killing a “betrayal of Islam” and “a truly barbarous act” with no basis in the Muslim faith.
Adding to widespread calls for an official accounting, Mr. Rigby’s family held an emotional news conference in Manchester, his hometown. There, his stepfather, Ian Rigby, flanked by the soldier’s sobbing mother and sister, broke down as he read a eulogy to the soldier, who had served in a combat unit in Helmand, the Afghan province that has been the scene of much of the bloodiest fighting of the war by British and American troops. “We would like to say, ‘Good night, Lee, rest in peace, our fallen soldier,’ ” Mr. Rigby said.
Video footage obtained by the tabloid Daily Mirror, released on Friday, showed the moment that the police responded to the attack, as one of the assailants ran at full tilt toward a marked police car carrying armed officers who fired a total of eight shots, wounding the suspects. The clip seemed to have been taken from a nearby apartment house. The attacker who ran at the police was shot twice within a few feet of the car. A second man seems to point a gun at the officers and more shots ring out, while screams of people nearby are clearly audible.
Senior political figures hastened to offer assurances that what MI5 knew about Mr. Adebolajo and Mr. Adebowale before Wednesday’s attack would be thoroughly investigated by MI5 itself, and by a parliamentary committee that has powers of scrutiny over the security agency. That suggested MI5 faces weeks, and perhaps months, of questioning over the affair.
The victim was identified as Lee Rigby, a 25-year-old army bandsman and machine gunner who had served in Afghanistan and was the father of a 2-year-old boy. He had left his barracks in plainclothes to visit his mother, the authorities said.
The chairman of the parliamentary committee, Malcolm Rifkind, a former British foreign minister, said Friday that he had already been briefed on the killing by Andrew Parker, MI5’s new chief, who assumed the post last month in succession to Jonathan Evans, the agency’s chief since 2007. Mr. Rifkind told the British newspaper The Guardian that he expected a fuller report next week, and that hearings, in private session, would be given “a high priority” in coming weeks.
In its first public remarks, the soldier’s family gave a wrenching and tearful news conference in the northern city of Manchester, his hometown. “We would like to say goodnight, Lee, rest in peace, our fallen soldier, we love you loads and words cannot describe how loved and sadly missed you will be,” his stepfather, Ian Rigby, said as the soldier’s 30-year-old widow, Rebecca Rigby, and mother, Lyn Rigby, sobbed on either side of him.
For MI5, which had a reputation for major successes in counterterrorism under Mr. Evans, the inquiry could be testing. Officials from MI5 and Scotland Yard’s specialist counterterrorism unit, known as SO-15, have been careful not to claim that they have been winning the war against groups inspired by the Sept. 11 attacks, and by the July 7, 2005, bombings on the London transit system that killed 52 bus and subway passengers. The official line under Mr. Evans was that combating terrorism prompted by Islamic extremism would be the work of a generation, and that further attacks, including some that might rival the horrors of 2001 and 2005, were likely, if not probable.
“When he’s in the U.K.,” his widow said, “you think he’s safe.”
A steady succession of arrests of people suspected of being terrorist plotters, and the ensuing trials had buttressed public confidence, but Wednesday’s killing threatened to undermine that feeling, if not shatter it.
Security officials said the suspects were radicalized British Muslim men with family origins in Nigeria. One was identified by the BBC as Michael Adebolajo, 28, who had been raised in a Christian family in Romford, east of London. He converted to Islam around 2001 and joined a radical Muslim group, Al Muhajiroun, that was banned in Britain in 2010 as an Islamic terrorist organization, notorious for having praised those who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks. The second suspect was identified in British news reports on Friday as Michael Adebowale, 22.
The suspects were under police guard in separate London hospitals, being treated for gunshot wounds, officials said.
Scotland Yard’s counterterrorismon Thursday raided six residential addresses that were said to have been linked to the attackers, one in Romford, one in the London suburb of Greenwich and the third in the village of Saxilby in Lincolnshire, 150 miles north of London, where neighbors said some of Mr. Adebolajo’s family members were living in a large, modern home in a new subdivision.
Scotland Yard said on Friday that two women, aged 29 and 31, arrested on Thursday on suspicion of conspiracy to murder the soldier had been released without charge but that a 29-year-old man was still being questioned.
The killing appeared to bear some of the hallmarks of “lone wolf” terrorism attacks like the one last month at the Boston Marathon. Involving low-tech weapons and a spontaneity aimed at foiling pre-emptive discovery, they have been propagated in recent years by an array of Islamic militant Web sites that Western security experts have linked to Al Qaeda.
Such attacks have been promoted as a means of striking back at Western nations, particularly Britain and the United States, in response to their success in disrupting terrorist networks with high-technology tools, including drones and satellite- and computer-aided surveillance systems.
There was a growing concern that Britain’s security services, after a long chapter of success in disrupting more complex terrorist plots since the transit system bombings in London that killed 56 people, including four suicide bombers, on July 7, 2005, might have missed opportunities to head off the Woolwich attack.
In that sense, the Boston Marathon bombings again provided a point of reference. The older of the two brothers accused of that strike, and some of his associates, had drawn the attention of the F.B.I. and other American authorities beforehand, in part through their ties to Chechnya, a mostly Muslim region of Russia with a history of terrorist and insurgent violence.
What British security officials know about the two men arrested in Mr. Rigby’s killing remains unclear. But unidentified officials who spoke with British reporters said both men’s names had appeared on lists of people known to have been involved with Islamic militant groups that have been under surveillance by agencies, including MI5, that form the front line in Britain’s counterterrorist operations.
In a statement from 10 Downing Street on Thursday, Prime Minister David said the actions of the security agencies involved would be open to review by two bodies that have formal powers in such matters, the Independent Police Complaints Commission, in the case of Scotland Yard, and a parliamentary body, the Intelligence and Security Committee, in the case of MI5 and MI6, which is the foreign intelligence agency.
