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London: The third attack onBritish soil in as many months has raisedmany uncomfortable questions about the nation's ability to combat deadly acts of terrorism.

But none are more difficult than the issue of home-grown terrorism. In the wake of recent attacks in the UK a depressing pattern has begun to emerge with police carrying out raids in areas becoming known as breeding grounds for radicalisation. Theattacks that took place near London Bridge and Borough Marketon Saturday were no different with police arresting 12 people in Barking, East London twodays later.

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A new video has emerged that appears to show Manchester bomber Salman Abedi outside his home.

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A recent dive exposed the extent to which the underwater wreck of HMAS Perth has been dismantled and removed for salvage metal.

A new video has emerged that appears to show Manchester bomber Salman Abedi outside his home.

But even before Khuram Shazad Butt and Rachid Redouaneand a third manyet to be identified, used a rented van and knives to murderseven people near London Bridge on Saturday night, the UK was trying to come to gripswith how Manchester local SalmanAbedihad managed to kill 22 people in his home town, less than a fortnightearlier, in the name of Islamic State.

In the days after the 22-year-oldAbedidetonated a bomb at the Manchester Arena, the British press generated almost daily reports onthe telltale signs that wereoverlooked. These includednumerous tip-offs from friends to authorities,his expulsionfrom Didsbury mosque after a public dispute with an imam,and reports of hisfamily's links to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group an Islamist organisationloosely affiliated with al-Qaeda which opposed Soviet forces in Afghanistan and Muammar Gaddafi's regime in Libya.

Though Britain's MI5 is already conducting an internal review into how Abedi slipped under its radar, it looks increasingly clear that the signs should have been unmissable from the beginning. Particularly givenAbedi's target was his home city one of Britain's three major hotspots for homegrown jihadists. Birmingham and East London, where the latest raids took place in the early hours of Monday morning, are the other two areas of deep concern for security officials.

"The Abedi case is looking a lot more like an intelligence problem," says Kyle Orton, from the Henry Jackson Society, a London think-tank.

"I know that's said after every one of these [attacks]," Orton adds. "It's usually not true, because intelligence agencies are very good at detecting extremists, but in this case he has been abroad many times and he comes from a background that should have been under a great deal more scrutiny."

When petty criminal-turned-extremist Khalid Masood rammed his hired car into tourists on Westminster Bridge in March, it was the sort of crude attack carried out by a loner with prior convictions that Europe has come to expect.

But Britainreacted differently to what happened in Manchester. Thescale, the death toll, the heinous targeting of children and the sophistication of the attackmade the bombingparticularly shocking.

"An improvised explosive device we haven't seen that in this country, there was a rudimentary bomb blown up in [the July 7, 2005 London attack] in the Tube, but that was a long time ago," said Karin von Hippel from the defence and security think tank RUSI.

Last year the global coalition fighting Islamic State in the Middle East, of which Australia is a member, warned IS would attempt further attacks in the West in retaliation for the destruction of its so-called caliphate. It quickly claimed responsibility for the Manchester carnage, saying it had been carried out by "one of its soldiers".

"This isn't a guy who has just ended up getting touch with a recruiter on WhatsApp and has been talked through it or provided with weapons or something by them, he's been in theatre with them and been trained by them and it looks like the first case of a returning foreign fighter," Mr Orton said.

Abedi is the British-born son of Libyan parents. His father Ramadan Abedi was arrested in Tripoli, along with another of his sons following the attack. He fled Libya for England in the 1990s but told Bloomberg he did not belong to extremist groups, as claimed by the Gaddafi regime.

Manchester would become home to Britain's largest Libyan community. Arthur Snell, a former British diplomat posted to Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa, and now with security consultants PGI Intelligence, says Britain initially turned a blind eye to Libyan arrivals in Britain, believing "these people are not a threat to the UK".

"Libya [under Gaddafi] was seen as a rogue state, so people who were in opposition to the Libyan regime were not [seen] as problematic," he told Fairfax Media.

"Where it gets complicated is where the West's attitude to Libya changed," he said. "If we're honest, the authorities in this country largely ignored the Libya issue because up until the moment of the Arab Spring, the radical threat in the UK was not seen as coming from that quarter."

That has changed with the case of the Abedis, with reports Ramadan Abedi took his sons to Libya "on holiday" to take part in the civil war against Gaddafi.

Mr Snell said some of the groups operating in Libya at the time were at the "jihadist end of the spectrum, but the focus of their militancy was the Gaddafi regime".

Mr Orton says the government's "don't ask, don't tell" policy was a terrible mistake.

"That came back to bite us when in the mid-2000s those networks mobilised to send people to Iraq and they came back again over Syria and a lot of these networks went over to [Islamic State], when the split formally happened with al-Qaeda [in early 2014]," he said.

Third-generation homegrown terrorists overwhelmingly show up in three spots across Britain: east London, Birmingham and Manchester. A report released earlier this year by the Henry Jackson Society showed three-quarters of all those convicted of terrorism offences came from these three areas.

The report analysed the profiles of the 269 people convicted over terrorist attacks and offences in Britain between 1998 and 2005. Forty-three per cent were from London, 18 per cent from Birmingham and 10 per cent from the north-west.

"In the case of Birmingham it was Kashmiri networks largely, and then it was in Manchester these Libyan networks to a large degree and again it's really heavily localised," said Mr Orton.

In Birmingham, the concentration of cases can be confined to just a couple of city wards. Overwhelmingly, as in Abedi's case, the perpetrators are young and male and their segregation and deprivation creates "viable recruiting pools".

But this recruitment is not simply a case of IS infiltration. Often the perpetrators are first to reach out, lured by IS's slick and relentless online propaganda. In January 2015 Boy X, Britain's youngest ever person to be convicted of terrorism offences, met Australia's Neil Prakash, a senior IS recruiter, online.

Boy X pleaded guilty to a plot to murder an Australian police officer on Anzac Day after sending more than 3000 messages to 18-year-old Sevdet Besim from Melbourne, urging him to kill a police officer on Anzac Day.

Boy X used the encrypted app Telegram to send Besim thousands of messages over just 11 days. It was Neil Prakash that put Boy X in touch with Besim. It was only when police began investigating Boy X's threats to kill his teacher in a "halal slaughter" that they uncovered the Anzac Day plot.

Boy X was in an online relationship with a 16-year-old known only as 'Girl Y' who pleaded guilty in Manchester's youth court after bomb-making instructions were found on her phone and in her sketch pad. She only came to the attention of authorities when Boy X's WhatsApp messages were examined.

Whether or not Abedi had any links to Prakash is not known but is possible given Abedihas been linked to Raphael Hostey, another IS recruiter and Prakash associate.

The London attacks demonstrate that big cities remain a target regardless of the police resources that are on the ground. But the Manchester bombing nevertheless raisesa worrying question in the minds of some experts:will terrorists focus on their home townsrather than higher-profile cities?

"It has been a wonder why they haven't picked less well-defended cities outside the capital where they could have even higher body counts for this kind of thing," Mr Orton said.

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Salman Abedi's path to jihadism in Manchester began in Libya and ended bloodily in Britain - The Sydney Morning Herald

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Caught in the middle of Libya's kidnapping nightmare BBC News Kidnapping has become a growing problem in Libya, where three governments and several militia are vying for power. The BBC's North Africa correspondent Rana Jawad has been talking to people personally affected. "My father was kidnapped yesterday.". and more »

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Caught in the middle of Libya's kidnapping nightmare - BBC News

Tunisian Foreign Minister Khemaies Jhinaoui (C), Algerian Minister for Maghreb and Africa Affairs Abdel Kadir Mesahil (L) and Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry (R)

The foreign ministers of Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt will hold a tripartite meeting on Monday and Tuesday here to discuss the situation in Libya, an Algerian Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Sunday, Xinhua reported.

This meeting is also part of continuous consultations between Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt over the crisis hitting Libya since 2011, as foreign ministers of these three nations are due to assess the political and security developments there, the spokesperson, Abdelaziz Benali Cherif, said in a statement, Xinhua added.

The meeting aims to reinforce the political process in Libyaon the path towards sustainable peace and national reconciliation, the spokesperson said, according to Xinhua.

In May, Algeria hosted the 11th ministerial meeting of Libyas neighboring nations and the participants reiterated their support for a political settlement of the crisis, Xinhua said.

The meeting gathered representatives of the six neighboring nations of Libya Tunisia, Algeria, Niger, Chad, Sudan and Egypt and representatives of the United Nations (UN), the African Union, the Arab League and the European Union, Xinhua indicated.

The participants adopted a 26-point statement, encouraging Libyan protagonists to join the dialogue and peace process and reiterating their commitment to support Libyans to head towards national reconciliation in a bid to pave the way for building strong political, military and security institutions so as to safeguard the unity and integrity of Libya, Xinhua added.

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Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt foreign ministers to hold tripartite meeting on Libyan crisis - Libyan Express

BENGHAZI, Libya Libya's eastern-based government has followed regional allies in cutting diplomatic ties with Qatar, its foreign minister, Mohamed Dayri, said on Monday.

The government, which sits in the eastern city of Bayda, has little authority within Libya. It is appointed by a parliament that also sits in the east and is aligned with powerful military commander Khalifa Haftar. They have spurned a U.N.-backed, internationally recognised government in the capital, Tripoli.

The eastern-based government's announcement came after Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain severed ties with Qatar, accusing it of supporting terrorism.

Dayri gave no immediate explanation for the Libyan move.

Regional powers have sided with opposing camps that have vied for power in Libya since the 2011 uprising that toppled veteran strongman leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Egypt and the UAE are considered key supporters of Haftar, who has built his position battling Islamist militants and other opponents in eastern Libya. East Libyan authorities accuse Qatar of backing rival, Islamist-leaning factions in western Libya.

Haftar's self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) has gained ground in central and southern Libya since last year, taking control of oil facilities and military bases. Most recently they have advanced near oasis towns in the Jufra and Sabha regions.

(Reporting by Ayman al-Warfalli; Writing by Aidan Lewis; Editing by Gareth Jones)

SYDNEY Australian police on Monday shot dead a gunman in the city of Melbourne who had been holding a woman hostage, police said, a confrontation for which the militant group Islamic State claimed responsibility.

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Libya's eastern-based government cuts diplomatic relations with Qatar - Reuters

A Libyan-Canadian cleric linked in U.S. and British media reports to Manchester bomberSalmanAbedisays he will return to Canada in weeks with the intention of clearing his name.

AbdulBasetEgwillawas an Ottawa-based imam until his return to Libya in 2007.In an exclusive interview with CBC News over Skype, Egwilla denied any connection toAbedi.

"I challenge whoever accuses me of such a connection to produce evidence, such as a time, date and place where I met with the suicide bomber,"Egwillasaid.

CBC Newshas agreed not to discloseEgwilla'scurrent location due to concerns for his safety, as he is the subject of death threats in Libya.

SalmanAbedi, 22, was identified on May 23 asthe suicide bomber who killed 22 people and wounded more than 60 others, including children, at a pop concert in Manchester. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack.

The bomber's father,RamadanAbedi, who denieshis son was a member of ISIS, has since been arrested by Libyan counter-terrorism officers.

U.S. and British media reports, citing anonymous sources, have claimed a link betweenSalman, his fatherandLibyan-Canadiancleric Egwilla.

Ramadan Abedi, the father of Salman Abedi, the bomber who killed 22 concert-goers in an attack in Manchester, pictured here in Tripoli, Libya, in May denies his son was a member of ISIS. Ramadan has since been arrested by Libyan counter-terrorism officers. (Hani Amara /Reuters)

A senior American official told the New York Times on May 24 that Salman Abedi "had links to a radical preacher in Libya" identified as Abdul Baset Egwilla, and that Egwilla's son had died fighting for ISIS.

Egwilla's son did die in 2016, but Libyan news reports and a martyrdom notice at the time said he was killed fighting for the Omar Mukhtar Brigade, a Libyan Islamist militia that is not a listed terrorist organization.

The Times newspaper in the U.K. reported May 27 that Ramadan Abedi was an associate of "extremist Canadian-Libyan preacher" Egwilla, and that the Libyan-Canadian is believed to have radicalized Ramadan's son, Salman Abedi.

The father would regularly meet with Egwilla at Friday prayers in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, in 2015, added the Times, citing a resident of the city who asked not to be named.

The Greater Manchester Police Force would neither confirm nor deny toCBC News thatEgwillais under investigation for possible involvement in the Manchester bombing.

Egwilla, who has been absent from Libya for several months since fleeing a plot to assassinate him,said he has never, to his knowledge, met eitherSalmanorRamadanAbedi.

"I am a public figure, I appear in the media. I show up in mosques and preach to a multitude of people. People know me, but I do not know them,"Egwillasaid.

"And if I met him once or twice before, it could be that he changed his beliefs later on, but I never met him in the first place,"Egwillasaid of the Manchester bomber.

Declassified documents released by Canada's Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre in 2014 flagged a YouTube video in whichEgwillais seen "promoting violent jihad in Libya."

"In the video,Egwillaurged an audience of Libyan Islamist fighters to take part in jihad, stating that 'jihad is simply and easily accessible, and does not require moving as in the past, as it was for Afghanistan and Iraq,'"the report said.

Egwillasays that call to jihad was made to recruit people to fight specifically against a militia led by a former general inMoammar Gadhafi'sregime, and not a call to support the global jihadi movement.

CBC reporter Evan Dyer interviewed former Ottawa Imam Abdul Baset Egwilla on Skype. The CBC has agreed not to disclose Egwilla's current location due to concerns for his safety. (CBC)

"I spoke about jihad only through Fajr Libya Dawn (a rebel militia alliance) and only when [MoammarGadhafi] suppressed peaceful demonstrators and bombed them with anti-aircraft weaponry," saidEgwilla. "This was unjust and an act of tyranny."

Egwilla said people claiming to be with the government of Canada have attempted to reach out to him using the app Viber,though he says he has never agreed to an interview.

Egwilla saidhe intends to speak to authorities to clear his name when he returns to Canada.

After seven years in Ottawa,Egwillaleft Canada for Libya in 2007, when Gadhafi'sregime began sending signals that it would not persecute returning dissidents.

Hebegan working at a Tripoli religious radio station and associated with a group of clerics that included Sadiq al-Ghariani, who today is the country's Grand Mufti, the top religious leader, and a strong supporter of Islamist militias.

When rebellion broke out in 2011,Egwillawas a prominent supporter, and after the fall of Gadhafi'sregime, was promoted to be the administrative director for the mosques in Tripoli. He said he became a prominent imam and broadcaster.

Death notice for Owais Egwilla, a son of a former Ottawa imam Abdul Baset Egwilla. He was reportedly killed during clashes in the Libyan city of Benghazi in March 2016 after being wounded in a battle between Islamist militants and Libyan military units loyal to General Khalifa Haftar. (SITE Intelligence Group)

In 2014, as splits emerged between liberals and Islamists over the direction post-Gadhafi Libya should take,Egwillaidentified with the "Libya Dawn" coalition of Islamist militias that seized Tripoli from the UN-backed government.

Libya Dawn soon found itself involved in a war with the secular forces of Gadhafi-era general Khalifa Haftar, andEgwilla's Ottawa-raised son Owais joined one of the Islamist militias battling Haftar. Owais died in combat in March last year.

It was reported in some quarters that OwaisEgwillahad died fighting for Islamic State. In fact, martyrdom notices posted at the time of his death show him as a member of the Omar Mukhtar Brigade, an Islamist militia that was part of the coalition that fought Islamic State and drove it out of its Libyan stronghold in Sirte.

Egwilla says he fled Libya eight months ago following the kidnapping and murder of fellow cleric Nadir al-Omrani by assassins of the Madkhali sect of Sunni Islam.

Madkhalis, followers of a school of thought founded by a Saudi cleric, have become increasingly active in Libya. Like Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Madkhalis in Libya have destroyed ancient shrines and manuscripts they deem un-Islamicand they consider voting to be heresy.

In a videotaped confession seen by CBC News, one of the killers told Libyan police that his group had a hit list that also includedEgwilla.

Egwillasays he also received threats from ISIS, which did indeed produce videos denouncing his group and fatwas calling for them to be killed.

It is a breach of Canadian law to call on private citizens to engage in violent extremism, said StephanieCarvin, an assistant professor at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs and a former national security analyst for the government of Canada.

Egwilla's willingness to speak to security agencies in Canada in an attempt to clear his name should not be taken as a hallmark of innocence, says Carvin.

Individuals who go abroad for extremist purposes tend to engage in a number of activities, including developing funding networks and radicalization activities, she says.

"When they come back, we can expect that they will also engage in those activities," says Carvin.

Egwilla, a Canadian citizen, has the right to return to Canada.

Bill C-51, however, would allow Canadian national security agencies to obtain a federal court warrant that would authorize a violation of that right as long as it does not cause harm or invade sexual integrity, says Kent Roach, a professor of law at the University of Toronto.

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Libyan-Canadian cleric linked to Manchester bomber plans return to Canada to clear his name - CBC.ca