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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.

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