Battle for Britain: Authorities Inundated with Terror Leads

As the full picture of Salman Abedi’s ties to radical Islam and a network of extremist Muslims takes shape, fresh concern is sure to be cast on the ability of British authorities to handle the scale of the jihadi threat in the country.

As of Thursday, a total of eight people were arrested by U.K. authorities in connection with the attack, including suicide bomber Salman Abedi’s older brother, as part of the investigation into a terror network to which Abedi belonged.

MI5 is currently managing 500 active investigations involving 3,000 persons of interest at any given time.

“I want to reassure people that the arrests that we have made are significant,” Greater Manchester Police chief Ian Hopkins said in a statement to the press on Thursday. “Initial searches of premises have revealed items that we believe are very important to the investigation.”

Hopkins suggested more arrests could be imminent.

“These searches will take several days to complete, as you would expect, therefore there will be some disruption. However, it is important that we continue with these searches,” Hopkins said. “We are now carrying out associated searches at a number of addresses.”

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British intelligence and law enforcement services received criticism when it emerged that Salman Abedi’s mother and some members of his mosque had warned MI5 of Abedi’s violent radicalism. But a senior government source told Britain’s Telegraph newspaper that security services are simply inundated with terror leads.

In the two months since the Westminster Bridge attack on March 22, authorities have foiled five Islamic terror attacks, the anonymous source said. Moreover, MI5 is currently managing 500 active investigations involving 3,000 persons of interest at any given time.

The volume of active terror investigations with which British authorities are dealing will likely further encourage U.K. voters to pressure the government to abandon mass migration and multiculturalism — a trend already begun with the Brexit vote.

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The BBC reported in February that at least 850 ISIS fighters with U.K. citizenship had re-entered the country. New reports suggest Abedi himself could have been one of them.

On Wednesday French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb told Sky News that Abedi is believed to have traveled to Syria and that he had “proven” links to ISIS. Both of Abedi’s brothers, are also reportedly ISIS loyalists, and his father was a member of a militant Islamist group in Libya in the 1990s.

Indeed, the fact that resources weren’t dedicated to monitoring Abedi despite his ties and despite the multiple warnings to authorities speaks volumes to the full extent of Britain’s problem with radical Islam.