Page 32 - Brian Dillon News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Knowledge and awareness of all the potential actors in a city like manchester, and you just cannot do that. you can put some greater standoff distance from crowds, but you also have concertgoers who were coming from the train station into the concert hall and do you scan them at the train station where there's another concentration of people out in the middle of the street, i mean these are incredibly complicated questions and they disrupt or freedoms and normal lives and you cannot do this everywhere. manchester is a big city, many mow terrible targets, not as much as in london and the symbol...

Brian, this, as bill was just saying, was an ariana grande concert, an american singer, the majority of her fans are young girls, teenagers, mostly families there, many of the victims we've already seen have been young girls. what do you make of this specific target? >> i think there's a number of aspects to it. i think the first point i would make is that this is classically a very soft target, a music venue where young people are attending, wouldn't necessarily of itself attract a significant threat assessment, is regrettably an easy target to attack. in the center of a city where it would a...

That he was at the manchester arena and detonated himself, what journey did he take, where exactly did he come from. it's significant, katie, the timing and target. >> yeah. >> this wasn't as sophisticated an attack as the bataclan in 2015 which involved four gunmen -- sorry many gunmen and four separate attacks. it was on a concert hall, when an american singer was -- had just finished her concert. it's three weeks just before the british general election. all of these things will be part of this police investigation. was he just a lone wolf, how sophisticated and knowledgeable was he really ...

Was killed. from there what is believed to be a single assailant ran around the corner and tried to gain entry through a gate, beyond which houses the members of parliament. brian dillon is with us from london. former operational head of scotland yard's firearms command, involved in counterterrorism and contingency planning and developed strategis for exactly this type of thing. mr. dillon, considering that, considering the drills you oversaw and all that london has been through, did everything work today? >> well, yes, i think from what we've seen in the reporting so far, we can have a degree...

Safe. the ultimate sharpened of that, it will always be, flesh and blood, police officers on the streets, putting themselves in the front line, really, to deal with harm's way when it comes to them. that's what we've witnessed today. >> final question. do you addition do you applaud the decision of the house of lords and the house of commons to sit as scheduled tomorrow? >> absolutely, yes. london doesn't bow to terrorism. london not bowed to hitler and his bombs in second world war and we're never going to give into people who wreak havoc on our streets. i support what they say, parliamentary...