Charles and Camilla meet Manchester heroes
THE Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall visited the scene of the Manchester Arena bombing yesterday – praising brave staff who rushed to the aid of victims.
Charles and Camilla stood in the Arena’s foyer near where terrorist Salman Abedi, 22, detonated his backpack suicide bomb on May 22.
The devastating blast killed 22 victims, the youngest being eight-year-old primary schoolgirl Saffie Rose Roussos, and injured more than 100 people.
His victims had all either been attending US singer Ariana Grande’s concert, or just arrived to pick up lovedones as the show ended.
Yesterday the royals were shown the half light of the foyer with its glass panels above still blown out, to view the spot where the carnage unfolded.
And they kept silent by the spot on the damaged tiled floor where Abedi triggered his bomb, packed with nuts and bolts to cause maximum slaughter.
They spent 10 minutes there as Bob Gallagher, forensic manager for the North West Counter Terrorism Unit, talked them through what happened when Abedi struck.
No cameras were allowed inside the area for the royal visit, as the area is still being treated as a crime scene. Later Charles and Camilla met medical and crowd management staff employed by the Arena, to discuss their dreadful experiences of the terror attack.
The couple listened intently as they asked what the staff had been confronted with just seconds after the blast and how they have coped since.
Only days after the outrage the Queen flew to Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital to meet some of the young injured survivors.
She told 14-year-old schoolgirl Evie Mills – who she met lying on her bed clutching a teddy bear: “It’s dreadful, very wicked, to target that sort of thing.”