22 killed in concert blast: Frantic search for kids
Bomb at Ariana Grande Manchester show.
MANCHESTER: An apparent suicide bomber set off an improvised explosive device that killed 22 people at the end of an Ariana Grande concert, Manchester police said today.
Police said dozens more were injured in last night’s blast carried out by a male, who was killed.
The South African government condemned the attack and extended its condolences “to the government and the people of the United Kingdom, in particular the families and loved ones of the deceased”.
A statement by the Department of International Relations and Co-operation said acts of violence and extremism have no place in society and constitute a threat to peace, security and development.
The department said it was in contact with the South African High Commission in London should any South African citizens have been affected.
Forensic investigations are continuing to determine if the attacker had accomplices, said Chief Constable Ian Hopkins. He provided no information about the individual who detonated the device.
Hopkins said some of the dead were children but provided no further details about the victims or the attacker.
Hopkins said police were treating the blast as an act of terrorism “until we know otherwise”. The local ambulance service says 59 people were taken to hospitals.
It was not immediately clear if police were including the attacker among the 22 people reported to have died.
The concert was attended by thousands of young music fans in northern England.
The singer, who was not injured, tweeted hours later: “Broken. From the bottom of my heart, I am so so sorry. I don’t have words.”
Manchester Arena said on its website the blast struck outside the venue as people were leaving. Some eyewitnesses said it happened in the foyer after the concert ended.
The incident sparked a night-long search for loved ones as frantic parents tried to locate their teenage children, and groups of friends scattered by the explosion sought to find one another.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Supporters of the extremist Islamic State group, which holds territory in Iraq’s Mosul and around its de facto capital in the Syrian city of Raqqa, celebrated the blast online. One wrote: “May they taste what the weak people in Mosul and (Raqqa) experience from their being bombed and burned”, according to the US-based SITE Intelligence Group.
AT LEAST 22 people were killed and more than 50 injured in an explosion at the end of a concert by US singer Ariana Grande in the English city of Manchester yesterday, and two US officials said a suicide bomber was suspected.
Prime Minister Theresa May said the incident was being treated as a terrorist attack.
If confirmed, it would be the deadliest militant assault in Britain since four British Muslims killed 52 people in suicide bombings on London’s transport system in July 2005.
The arena has a capacity for 21 000 people and the singer had been performing to an audience that included many children.
The leaders of Europe sent Britain offers of support and sympathy.
Emmanuel Macron, newlyelected president of France which has been hard hit by Islamist attacks in recent years, would offer May co-operation in a call later in the day, Macron’s office said.
“I offer my thoughts to the British people, to the victims and their loved ones,” Macron himself wrote on Twitter.
“We are fighting terrorism together.”
European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, chief executive of the EU, said: “It breaks my heart to think that, once again, terrorism has sought to instil fear where there should be joy, to sow division where young people and families should be coming together in celebration.
“Today we mourn with you. Tomorrow we will work side by side with you to fight back against those who seek to destroy our way of life,” Juncker said.
“These cowardly attacks will only strengthen our commitment to work together to defeat the perpetrators of such vile acts.”
Juncker’s security commissioner, Briton Julian King, said on Twitter: “Today we all express our solidarity with the victims of the terrible Manchester terrorist attack.”
EU flags flew at half mast outside the union’s headquarters in Brussels
EU chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, who will launch talks with May’s government next month, after Britain’s June 8 election, to leave the EU, said there would be “support to the UK government in (the) fight against terrorism”.
Accepting his formal negotiating mandate from EU govern- ments just yesterday, Barnier had underlined a determination to maintain close security co-operation with Britain, which has one of Europe’s most powerful intelligence services and long experience of combating domestic political violence.
Other leaders lined up to express solidarity, among them Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, whose capital was home to an Islamic State cell which killed 130 people in Paris in November 2015, many of them at a rock concert, and which later struck in Brussels itself, killing 32 people in March last year.
Martin Schulz, the former speaker of the European Parliament now challenging Angela Merkel for the post of Ger- man chancellor in a September election, echoed many of their sentiments:
“Horrible news coming from Manchester,” Schulz said on Twitter. “We don’t know much yet but it’s inconceivably tragic. My thoughts are with the victims and their families.”
US President Donald Trump said: “I extend my deepest condolences to those so terribly injured in this terrorist attack, and to the many killed and the families, so many families of the victims.
“So many young, beautiful innocent people living and enjoying their lives murdered by evil losers in life.”
A witness who attended the concert said she felt a huge blast as she was leaving the arena, followed by screaming and a rush by thousands of people trying to escape the building.
A video posted on Twitter showed fans, many of them young, screaming and running from the venue.
Dozens of parents frantically searched for their children, posting photos and pleading for information on social media.
“We were making our way out, and when we were right by the door there was a massive explosion and everybody was screaming,” concert-goer Catherine MacFarlane said.
“It was a huge explosion – you could feel it in your chest. It was chaotic. Everybody was running and screaming and just trying to get out.”
A spokesman for Grande, 23, said the singer was “okay”.
May said her thoughts were with the victims and their families. “We are working to establish the full details of what is being treated by the police as an appalling terrorist attack,” she said.
“All our thoughts are with the victims and the families of those who have been affected.”
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but US officials drew parallels with the co-ordinated attacks in November 2015 by Islamist militants on the Bataclan concert hall and other sites in Paris, which claimed about 130 lives.
Two US officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said that initial signs pointed to a suicide bomber as being responsible for the blast.
“The choice of venue, the timing and the mode of attack all suggest this was terrorism,” said a US counterterrorism official who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
Britain is on its second-highest alert level of “severe”, meaning an attack by militants is considered highly likely.
British counterterrorism police have said they are making on average an arrest every day in connection with suspected terrorism.
In March, a British-born convert to Islam ploughed a car into pedestrians on London’s Westminster Bridge, killing four people before stabbing to death a police officer who was on the grounds of parliament. He was shot dead at the scene.
In 2015, Pakistani student Abid Naseer was convicted in a US court of conspiring with al-Qaeda to blow up the Arndale shopping centre in Manchester in April 2009.
Manchester Arena, the largest indoor arena in Europe, opened in 1995 and is a popular concert and sporting venue.
Paula Robinson, 48, from West Dalton, about 64km east of Manchester, said she was at the train station next to the arena with her husband when she felt the explosion and saw dozens of teenage girls screaming and running away from the venue.
“We ran out,” Robinson said. “It was literally seconds after the explosion. I got the teens to run with me.”
Robinson took dozens of teenage girls to the nearby Holiday Inn Express hotel and tweeted out her phone number to worried parents, telling them to meet her there.
She said her phone had not stopped ringing since her tweet. “Parents were frantic, running about trying to get to their children,” she said.
The blast occurred on the anniversary of the murder of soldier Lee Rigby, who was hacked to death on a London street on May 22, 2013.
Rigby’s murder gained international notoriety when Michael Adebolajo was filmed by passers-by standing in the street with blood-soaked hands trying to justify the attack.