You say in your editorial (3 March) that “levels of secrecy that go beyond MI5’s operational needs damage public confidence and breed conspiracy theories”. The truth is more prosaic and infinitely more depressing. MI5 has avoided effective scrutiny of its operational failures, most recently at Fishmongers’ Hall in 2019, where Usman Khan killed our son, Jack Merritt, and Saskia Jones, by appearing to hide behind the need to maintain secrecy lest terrorists discover its methods.
The establishment refuses to see its obvious incompetence and disingenuousness. At the inquests of Jack and Saskia, the coroner did not require any of the MI5 staff involved in the surveillance of Khan to be questioned, even under strict anonymity and with previously agreed questions. Instead, MI5 put up a “corporate witness” who gave evidence from inside a sealed box and provided no useful information.
The impression of M15 that we were left with was of an organisation that was poor at observing known terrorists’ actions and completely ineffective at acting on intelligence. The Manchester Arena inquiry has got closer to the truth by insisting that operational staff at MI5 gave evidence in person, rather than accepting the corporate “nothing to see here” whitewash, but parliament needs to go further in holding MI5 to account. Repeated failures show that allowing it to mark its own homework lets victims and the public down.
David and Anne Merritt
Cambridge
• The real failings of the security services in relation to the Manchester bombing lie less in the interpretation of pieces of intelligence, where human error was evident, but in the strategic failure to focus on the movements of young men moving between the UK and war-torn Libya. The responsibility goes beyond that of MI5 to that of the relationships between the various governmental agencies involved, given that this was an issue that straddled domestic and foreign policy, homeland security and international terrorism.
Christopher Hill
Duxford, Cambridgeshire
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