Was Salman Abedi, the 22-year-old suspected of carrying out the mass-casualty suicide bombing in Manchester, part of a terror cell?
The Islamic State says so, but as police and intelligence officers continue investigating the tragedy, they may pay little attention – if any – to what any terror group claims, according to one expert with more than 30 years’ experience in the intelligence field.
Whether a terror group claims responsibility for an attack such as Monday’s has little bearing on how investigators treat the case, said Phil Gurski, a former CSIS analyst and current president of Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting.
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“This is good, free PR for ISIS,” he said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
“I would take anything they say with a grain of salt, especially now with ISIS on the ropes.”
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On the other hand, said Center for Global Policy fellow Kamran Bokhari, terror experts track claims – the number, the timing, the casualties, etc. – in an effort to weigh them.
Why would ISIS claim responsibility?
Last night’s terror bombing has so far claimed 22 lives, according to police. The sights and sounds of children and young adults running and screaming, separated from their parents, have left world leaders, celebrities and people in much of the Western world shaken.
Meanwhile, reports from the coalition involved in the fight against ISIS, say the terror group is losing ground. Claiming responsibility for a mass-casualty bombing is the perfect opportunity for the group to change the dial on that narrative and strike fear in anyone who though they were on the brink, Gurski said.
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When ISIS claimed the Manchester attack earlier Tuesday morning, there were some discrepancies between its version of events and that of the police. For example, the ISIS release had no mention of it being a suicide attack, the number of dead was higher (30) than the police had said (22), and so was the number of injured (70 versus 59).
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Despite the differences, ISIS rarely claims responsibility for a mass attack they didn’t either direct or inspire, Amarnath Amarasingam, a University of Waterloo post-doctoral fellow and fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, has said.
And though Bokhari cautioned “a claim is a claim; anyone can make a claim,” he quickly stressed his doubts that 22-year-old Abedi acted alone.
U.K. officials have so far arrested three individuals in connection with the bombing.
“Yes, you can become radicalized on the internet,” said Bokhari, who is also a fellow with the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. “But a 22-year-old doesn’t know how to make a bomb … It’s very unlikely he learned the ingredients, how to assemble and detonate a bomb from a manual on the internet.”
But does that mean an inherent, direct association with the Islamic State? Not necessarily, say the experts Global News interviewed.
The intelligence investigation
Regardless of any potential association between a suspect and terror group, investigators will continue gathering intelligence. The first question to answer is whether the individual was known to police, Gurski said.
“If not, they’ll start to look at: who’s his family, his neighbours? They’ll knock on doors, try to get any information about him,” he said.
Information could come from family, friends, a roommate, classmate, place of worship, or just about anywhere else, said the intelligence expert.
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At the same time, the team of police and intelligence officers will be doing everything to ensure another attack doesn’t materialize, said Bokhari.
But staying ahead of a terror network has its challenges, he said.
“The network knows how authorities react to these events,” he said. “The bad guys know what police intelligence officers are looking for.”
The digital trail
Big puzzle pieces will also come from the suspect’s electronic devices, Gurski said.
“Who is he calling? Who is he texting? What’s his Twitter handle? Have we come across these numbers or accounts before? If so, in what context?”
Here, investigators are looking for things such as who and what influenced the attacker, he said.
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But even this can present difficulties, Bokhari said.
“The operatives try to not leave behind any IP addresses, they cover their signatures … But skilled operatives will sometimes deliberately hang out with people, call people, text people to confuse law enforcement,” he said.
In some cases, investigators try to follow money trails to see who funded a particular attack, though that likely won’t be the case with this investigation, Gurski said.
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But what’s likely of concern is how the suspect learned to build the bomb, he said.
“Was it a simple YouTube video or instructions from a specific person?” Gurski asked. “If there was anyone influencing him and that person is still alive, you have to stop them.”
Basically, the intelligence expert said, investigators want to find the brains of the operation.
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