Police investigating the London Bridge terror attack have raided an address in Illford, Essex, as pressure mounted on the security services over missed opportunities to stop at least one of the attackers who was investigated for extremism by police two years ago.
Officers from the Metropolitan police’s counter-terrorism command began searches after entering an address in Ilford at 1.30am on Tuesday. The police said searches were continuing and nobody had been detained.
On Monday night, the remaining 10 people who had been arrested during the day by armed police were released from police custody without charge. A man and a woman had already been released. No one remains in custody.
Khuram Shazad Butt, 27, was investigated by officers in 2015 but they found no evidence he was planning an attack and he was “prioritised in the lower echelons of our investigative work”, according to assistant commissioner Mark Rowley, Britain’s top counter-terrorism officer.
Pakistani-born British citizen Butt and Rachid Redouane, who claimed to be Moroccan or Libyan, were two of the three men who carried out the murderous rampage at London Bridge and Borough Market in which seven people died and dozens more were injured on Saturday night.
Transport for London has confirmed that Butt worked as a trainee customer services assistant for six months last year. Butt was also an associate of radical hate preacher Anjem Choudary and his banned group al-Muhajiroun and had appeared in a Channel 4 documentary called The Jihadis Next Door unfurling what appeared to be an Islamic State flag in Regent’s Park in central London.
Officers at Scotland Yard believe they have identified the third accomplice, but he has not yet been named.
Rowley said security officials opened an investigation into Butt in 2015 and a few months later received a call via the counter-terrorism hotline from a member of the public concerned about his extremism. However, because the investigation into him did not reveal evidence of attack planning or terrorist activity the priority of his case was lowered, although his remained one of the 500 most active counter-terrorism investigations.
The disclosure means that perpetrators in all three of the terrorist outrages to hit Britain this year – Westminster Bridge, Manchester Arena and London Bridge – had at some point appeared on the radar of authorities.
Rowley said: “I have seen nothing yet that a poor decision was made”.
Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, acknowledged that MI5 and the police will have to answer questions about why a known extremist managed to carry out the attack without being stopped. His comments go much further than Theresa May, who has said she would not comment while the investigations are ongoing.
He told Sky News: “People are going to look at the front pages today and they’re going to say ‘how on earth could we have let this guy or possibly more through the net? What happened, how could he possibly be on a Channel 4 programme and be committing atrocities like this?’ That is a question that will need to be answered by MI5, by the police, as the investigation goes on.”
“Questions need to be asked,” said Richard Burgon, Labour’s shadow justice secretary. He added: “No matter who is in government it is always the case that sometimes an extremist, a terrorist, a murderer may get through.”
He said one of the “real worrying factors” of the Manchester and London attacks was that members of the community had called anti-terror hotlines and that in Butt’s case he had appeared in a documentary about jihadis.
“We need to properly fund our police service and fund our security and intelligence services,” he said.
As the political response to the terror attack became dominated by a row over police numbers, the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, warned that Londoners faced “more danger” if proposed government police cuts went ahead, with the capital losing between 3,000 and 12,000 officers.
He said: “The Met police service has lost over the last seven years £600m,” he said. “As brilliant as they are, that’s a big big cut. Over the next four years the current Conservative government has plans to cut a further £400m and on top of that they are changing the police funding formula, which means we could lose a further £700m. That’s £1.7bn. We’ve worked out that if they carry through with their plans we could be losing between 3,000 and 12,000 additional officers. That’s not sustainable. There’s no doubt fewer police officers means we are in more danger.”
Robert Quick, Britain’s former counter-terrorism chief, has told the Guardian government cuts to police funding have damaged attempts to prevent attacks.
“Counter-terrorism funding is ringfenced but cuts to the general policing budget has impacted on neighbourhood policing teams in many parts of the country including London,” he said. “This has reduced the capacity of the police to work in communities building relationships and trust to in turn generate community-based intelligence about persons of concern.”
Eighteen people injured in the attack remain in a critical condition in hospital and there are fears that missing Australian woman Kirsty Boden, 28, is among the dead. Her compatriot, Sara Zelanek, 21, remains missing. Boden from Loxton, South Australia, was working as a health professional in London. Neither is there any word of the 39-year old Spaniard Ignacio Echeverría, an HSBC worker hailed as a hero after apparently using his skateboard to take on the attackers and defend an injured woman.
Canadian citizen Christine Archibald and Londoner James McMullan are the two victims who have been confirmed as dead so far.
A minute’s silence for the victims of the attack is to be held across the UK at 11am on Tuesday.
