London - Security officials made a string of blunders in tracking the fanatics who butchered Lee Rigby, an official report said on Tuesday.
Agents dismissed Michael Adebolajo as a drug dealer who was not a threat to national security weeks before the merciless killing outside Woolwich barracks in London in May 2013.
By that time, Adebolajo and his accomplice Michael Adebowale had featured in seven MI5 investigations.
Following a series of errors, including paperwork delays, neither of the Muslim converts was under intrusive surveillance at the time of the murder.
Officers from the security service had closed their operation against Adebolajo on April 11, 2013 - just six weeks before the atrocity - and suggested police should instead arrest him for drugs.
Incredibly, however, the Metropolitan Police lost the number of his house so no further action was taken.
The unnamed officer in Romford who took the decision said his address would be too hard to find. The log reads: “Closed... cannot find number... and this is a long road.”
In the case of Adebowale, he first came to the attention of MI5 in August 2011 after studying hate-filled extremist material on the internet. However, it took eight months for officials to start investigating him - three months to find his name, followed by five months of “inaction”.
In its report, the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee said there was no excuse for the delay, though it conceded it did not have an impact on the final outcome.
There were similar delays in mounting more detailed surveillance after the security services received intelligence in March 2013 that Adebowale was handing out extremist material.
It took more than a month to complete the paperwork, which was sent backwards and forwards between MI5 lawyers and staff – only being completed one day before the killing.
Theresa May, the Home Secretary, was finally able to sign the warrant as an “urgent application” only in the hours after Fusilier Rigby had been butchered.
The 191-page report contains a string of redactions - but glosses over the attempts made by MI5 to recruit Adebolajo as an informant. On Tuesday, David Cameron said there were “lessons to be learned”.
He told MPs that £130-million would be invested into the security services to help identify lone wolf terrorists. The ISC, which had access to hundreds of pages of secret intelligence, identified at least four missed opportunities to uncover more evidence about the threat the men posed.
MI5 had linked both Adebolajo and Adebowale to Anjem Choudary’s extremist al-Muhajiroun group and its various offshoots.
Adebolajo cropped up in five inquiries, two of which were priority one investigations – the most serious classification.
Yet neither MI5 or MI6 was aware that he had travelled to Kenya in November 2010, where he was arrested on suspicion of attempting to travel to Somalia to join the terror group al-Shabaab. MI6, in particular, comes under blistering attack from the ISC for showing little interest in the fact a British national had been stopped as a possible “jihadi tourist”.
However the MPs said: “We have concluded that, given what the agencies knew at the time, they were not in a position to prevent the murder of Fusilier Rigby.”
Daily Mail