Manchester Arena attack inquiry adjourns for secret hearings
The victims' families, lawyers and media are excluded on national security grounds
Families of the 22 people murdered in the Manchester Arena bombing have been told as much information as possible will be released to them, as the public inquiry adjourned for three weeks of hearings in secret.
Closed hearings, where only the chairman of the inquiry, the inquiry legal team and Home Office lawyers will be present, will start next week at an undisclosed location, with bereaved families, their lawyers and the press and public excluded on national security grounds.
The hearings will cover more evidence about whether the security services and counter terror police could or should have prevented suicide bomber Salman Abedi and his brother Hashem launching the plot that murdered 22 people and injured hundreds more at Manchester Arena on May 22, 2017.
Four MI5 witnesses will give evidence during the closed sessions, including the senior MI5 officer who gave evidence from behind a screen in the open sessions earlier this week and was identified only as witness J.
The closed hearing will also hear evidence from 10 witnesses who are all officers in the North West Counter Terrorism Police.
Sir John Saunders, chairman of the inquiry, ruled earlier that if some of the secret service evidence was held in public it could compromise national security by revealing MI5 and counter-terror police operations and methods, or assist terrorists in evading detection or help carry out similar atrocities.
Lawyers for the families have called for "maximum disclosure" when possible to ensure national security is not used as a blanket measure to restrict public knowledge of mistakes.
As the inquiry was adjourned until next week, Paul Greaney QC, counsel to the inquiry, said:
"Understandably, there is concern about the closed hearing.
"The inquiry legal team does recognise that when the bright light of public scrutiny is not brought to bear on some parts of the evidence, there may be a perfectly natural adverse reaction from those to who this process means so much.
"We will, we assure everyone, without fear or favour, ask the questions we consider need to be asked of the witnesses and we will follow the evidence wherever it leads.
"As has been said, throughout the closed hearing, the inquiry legal team will be constantly vigilant for evidence which can be broken out from closed into open."
Some of the secret evidence may be made public, in whole or in part, if the chairman decides the information would not compromise national security.
Some pre-vetted information may also be released, to give a "gist" of what the evidence heard was about.
One matter the closed hearings will cover will concern the failure of MI5 on two occasions to pass on "highly relevant" intelligence to counter terror police in Manchester in the months before the bombing.
In an independent assessment of MI5 and police internal reviews of terror attacks in the UK in 2017, Lord Anderson QC concluded the significance of the intelligence received by MI5 was not fully appreciated at the time and thought to relate to non-nefarious or to criminal activity on the part of Abedi.
In fact the Anderson report concluded:
"In retrospect, the intelligence can be seen to have been highly relevant to the planned attack."
The closed hearings start on Monday and the public hearings will recommence on November 22.