Relatives react to Arena attack report
Official report found attacker had been on "MI5 radar"
Story by PA:
Relatives of the Manchester bomber's victims have said they do not blame the security services after an official report found the attacker had been on MI5's radar.
Salman Abedi had once been a subject of interest'' for counter-terror officers, who had not yet held a scheduled meeting to discuss the 22-year-old when he detonated his suicide bomb at Manchester Arena.
A review found that counter-terrorism police and MI5 could have succeeded in stopping Abedi had the cards fallen differently''.
Olivia Campbell-Hardy, 15, from Bury, was one of 22 people killed in the terror attack which happened after an Ariana Grande concert on May 22.
Steve Goodman, the step-father of Olivia's father, said: I have started a charity for her, Liv's Trust, the motto is, 'We choose love'. I will not call anybody for doing their jobs or doing their best.
The police were doing their jobs as best they could. Unfortunately information is not always reliable. They have to think before they act and unfortunately it turned out too late.''
Asked about the report finding Abedi might have been stopped had the cards fallen differently'' and a meeting scheduled to discuss intelligence on him held sooner, Mr Goodman said:It probably means, my interpretation is, if they had decided to have the meeting earlier they might have caught him.
But meetings are put on schedules...
I don't hold any malice to them.''
Dan Hett, whose 29-year-old PR manager brother Martyn Hett was killed in the blast, said the review's findings were being unfairly portrayed as mistakes''.
In a series of tweets, Mr Hett said: Unsure where I stand on this. this was a hard story to read, make no mistake, but people are painting these decisions as straight-up mistakes, and that feels like an oversimplification.
'Had the cards fallen differently' - hard as it is to imagine this falling differently, I can't fathom how complicated modern antiterrorism intelligence is. hindsight is an easy thing to fall back on.
The headlines paint a fairly slanted assessment that at a glance implies mistakes, and this definitely doesn't sit okay. as usual, outraged armchair experts come out of the woodwork to criticise.
Tellingly, the positive aspects (I know, I know) around successful work are only footnotes in most articles about this. this isn't black and white, none of this is, ever.
And of course, the commentary that will pop out from our gutter press and the usual unqualified twitter gobshites (you know who you are) will distort this further still. don't be suckered in.
The cards didn't fall differently, for more reasons than any of us could possibly fathom. use hindsight if it can improve the future, but assigning blame is a mug's game. out.''