Born in Britain, he was a fan of the world-famous Manchester United soccer club, like so many 20-something men in the northern English city.
More recently, however, according to neighbors, he was heard "chanting prayers loudly in the street" outside his home, and a friend said he had grown a beard and begun "acting strangely," the London Daily Mail reported.
On Monday night, Salman Abedi, set off a bomb strapped to his body packed with nuts and bolts that tore through a young crowd of concert-goers in his city, killing 22 people -- one as young as 8 -- and injuring another 59.
While a profile of Abedi, the son of Libyan refugees, is still emerging, it's already been reported that he was known to authorities prior to the attack.
It's a familiar refrain.
Khalid Masood, the 52-year-old Muslim who ran over pedestrians on Westminster Bridge then killed a police officer at the Parliament building in March, also had been investigated for concerns about "violent extremism."
And at one point or another prior to their attacks, law enforcement also had an eye on San Bernardino killer Syed Farook, Fort Hood killer Nidal Hasan, Boston Marathon murders Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Chattanooga killer Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez and Orlando killer Omar Mateen.
After the London attack, Philip Haney, a former Islam subject matter expert for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, asked: "What is the law-enforcement standard that Masood didn't meet that caused his case to go dark?"
He points out that law-enforcement investigators continue to be hindered from probing the religious motivation of individuals such as Abedi and Masood to determine whether or not they pose a threat to national security.
"The incessant refusal to plainly and courageously identify the malevolent ideology inherent in Islamic supremacism" is putting the nation at risk, Haney told WND Tuesday.
He saw the consequences of a policy that refuses to name the enemy as a Department of Homeland Security officer who worked with one of the National Targeting Center's advanced units, which provides information in real time to officers at ports of entry. Haney helped develop a case in 2011 on a worldwide Islamic movement known as Tablighi Jamaat. Within a few months, the case drew the “concern” of the State Department and the DHS’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Office because the Obama administration believed it unfairly singled out Muslims. The case effectively was shut down, even though the intelligence had been used to connect members of the movement to several terrorist organizations and financing at the highest levels, including for Hamas and al-Qaida.
Only a few years later, Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, were found to have been tied to Tablighi Jamaat, meaning if the case had been allowed to continue, the attack might have been prevented. Later, Haney also found the Orlando killer Mateen had a link to the case.
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Haney has said that if he had been given the opportunity to question San Bernardino killer Farook upon his return to the U.S. from Saudi Arabia in 2014, he would have asked him about the fact that he had grown a Shariah-compliant beard and was wearing an Islamic headdress while his passport photo showed him bareheaded and clean-shaven.
"We need to adjust and improve our ability to observe and address this tactical blind spot," Haney said.
"You can still do it without violating our civil rights and civil liberties."
When he worked for DHS, he and his colleagues collected information on visitors to the U.S. that included their travel patterns.
"Through law enforcement tools, we got to a place where had a functional database with derogatory information on 1,600 individuals that enabled us to take law enforcement actions based on observable trends," he explained.
It didn't mean, he pointed out, that all of those people were immediately barred from entry or arrested if they were in the country.
"We didn't just go in there wholesale and shut them down, but in the process of monitoring them we would have noticed if all of sudden there was an outbreak of x, y and z events happening near, let's say, LaGuardia Airport, that would indicate possible terrorist or criminal activity.
"You have to be able to establish criteria and have the legal authority to continue gathering information," he said.
"That's what's called connecting the dots. It's basic," Haney emphasized.
"But if your government tells you you can't use your authority to connect the dots, you find yourself where we are."
'Inappropriate and intrusive questions'
WND reported in January the pressure put on the federal government by Islamic groups funded from abroad to remove religious indicators from law enforcement practices and policies.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations -- a U.S. front for the Muslim Brotherhood, according to FBI evidence -- filed complaints in January with CBP, the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department "reporting the systematic targeting of American-Muslim citizens for enhanced screening by CBP."
CAIR's Florida branch further complained that CBP has asked American Muslims "inappropriate and intrusive questions" at secondary inspection and has "passed that information on to the FBI to maintain a registry of information on American Muslims."
Among the questions the group finds objectionable are:
- Are you a devout Muslim?
- How many times a day do you pray?
- What school of thought do you follow?
- What Muslim scholars do you listen to?
- What do they preach in your mosque?"
Included in CAIR-Florida's complaints to the CBP were questions asked of a Canadian Muslim citizen who was denied entry to the U.S.
Among them was, "Why did you shave your beard?"