HOW CITY BECAME A CRUCIBLE OF EXTREMISM
Almost exactly a year ago, Greater manchester Police were forced to apologise after a fake suicide bomber shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ as part of a training exercise involving a simulated terrorist attack at the city’s biggest shopping mall.
Hundreds of volunteers joined the exercise at the trafford Centre, which took police months to plan and was designed to replicate the bomb and gun atrocities which killed more than 160 people in Paris and Brussels in 2015 and 2016.
Assistant chief constable Garry shewan said sorry for linking the mock attack with religion after criticism that it stereotyped all muslims by using the Arabic phrase for ‘God is greatest’.
the exercise was staged a few months after Andrew Parker, the head of mI5, had warned that manchester was an Islamist breeding ground. together with london and the West midlands, it was where many of the estimated 3,000 home-grown Islamic state militants were living and believed to be preparing to launch devastating attacks.
the truth is that dozens of terrorists have emerged from this northern city – many from the area of moss side, which is less than two miles from Fallowfield, where monday’s bomber lived.
once impoverished, moss side has had its troubles: a white and West Indian gang culture, gun crime, and race riots. Now, even as it has been gentrified by students and young families, it suffers from another infamy.
Nine men who came from here have either killed themselves in the name of Islamic state, disappeared in suspicious circumstances and are suspected of fighting for the terror outfit in the middle East, or been jailed for terror-linked offences.
spread the geographical net a bit wider, towards Fallowfield and the number of men is 16. many have links to manchester’s notorious ‘jihadi brides’, twin schoolgirls salma and Zahra Halane who left school and slipped out of the UK in 2015 to join Islamic state.
Described as Is recruiters of other young UK women, the girls declared on social media: ‘Allah, the merciful…we came to hate the infidels [non-muslims] in Britain – to such a degree we could not even bear to look at them. Best advice is to get the whole family to travel to the Islamic state.’ the connections do not end there. monday’s bomber, British-born salman Abedi, grew up just yards from the high school once attended by the twins – both then aspiring medical students. He also lived in moss side before his family moved to Fallowfield.
Furthermore, a cousin of the twins, A-level student Abdullahi Ahmed Jama Farah, 20, was jailed last year for terror offences after he created ‘an Is hub of communication’ for like-minded young extremists from his mother’s home ... in Fallowfield.
the evil seeds of hatred were sown in the suburbs of this once- prosperous city years ago. In 2000 a small, white home computer was discovered in the dusty corner of a shabby student flat in manchester’s Didsbury lived in by a libyan-born muslim terrorist.
Undercover British police, tipped off by America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, found it contained the official training manual of Al Qaeda terrorists. seen by the mail, it explained in deadly detail how to wage a ‘holy war’ against Christian infidels on the streets of Britain.
When the 18- chapter manual, in Arabic, was printed out, it ran to 180 closely typed A4 pages giving specific and intricate details on how to make explosives, mix poisons, carry out urban killings and become a suicide bomber. It was designed to ‘re-educate’ new recruits living in the West and transform them into holy warriors.
A preface stated: ‘our main mission is the overthrow of the godless regimes and to force their replacement with Islam. You have to be willing to undergo martyrdom for the purpose of establishing the religion of majestic Allah on earth.
‘Explosives are the safest weapon for the holy warriors. they strike the enemy with sheer terror and fright.’
the computer, which contained what the FBI dubbed the ‘manchester Document’, was owned by a 6ft 2in 35-year-old bearded man called Abu Anas who had slipped illegally into northern Britain and successfully claimed political asylum in 1995.
THEterrorist fled Britain before police stormed his flat on a may morning in 2000. He made for Afghanistan with a $25million price on his head and was, luckily, captured by Us forces.
He died of liver disease in Us custody at 50. But his legacy through the manual lived on.
For it was found again – among other terrifying documents promoting Islamic terror – on public computers at manchester Central library and other libraries across Britain, a few years later during a mail investigation.
When investigating the story, I was told that youths from manchester regularly spent hours reading this and other terror documents at the library so with other mail reporters, I examined the computers’ history directories before handing our information to mI5 to investigate further.
As we reported at the time, one librarian in manchester told us: ‘We have been specifically instructed not to challenge the young men who are actively accessing the sites of these terrorist organisations.’
the librarian had been silenced by political correctness – just as the manchester Police were when they tried to stage a realistic mock terror attack designed to save people’s lives.
tragically, it appears the police were on the right track.