Jihadi ‘rang his mother just before blast’

IT WAS claimed last night that bomber Salman Abedi spoke to his mother in Tripoli by phone shortly before the attack.

A Libyan security source told the BBC’s Newsnight that Abedi rang his brother in Libya, telling him to get their mother Samia Tabbal to call him.

It also emerged that the 50-year-old woman is a nuclear scientist who graduated from Tripoli university ‘top of her class’, according to a family friend.

She is a close friend of the wife of former Al Qaeda commander Abu Anas Al-Libi who once featured on the FBI most wanted terrorists list, with a £20million bounty. He spent five years in Manchester, having won asylum in Britain in 1995. He was later suspected of helping to plot the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which killed a total of 224.

Al-Libi returned to Libya in 2000, and was captured by US Special Forces in Tripoli in 201 . He died in custody two years later. His wife Umm Abdul Rahman said she went to college in Tripoli with Abedi’s mother, who studied nuclear engineering, and that the women had lived together in Manchester.