Bomber’s childhood friend became gang rapist
SITTING on a wall with their friends, they look like normal teenagers.
But one of these youths would grow up to be a suicide bomber and another a gang rapist.
Manchester concert bomber Salman Abedi used to hang around with Bilal Ahmed, who is now serving a nine-year prison sentence for luring a 16year-old girl into a hotel room and raping her along with a mob of attackers. The victim, a gifted musician, was introduced to the group from south Manchester’s Somali community – among them Ahmed plus Muhyadeen Osman and Mowled Yussuf – by a mutual friend in 2013.
They lured her back to a run-down hotel in Rush-
olme, Manchester, where they had spent the previous night celebrating Muslim festival Eid.
Finding an unlocked room, the mob forced her inside and each subjected her to a degrading attack – in the words of the judge, picking on her as ‘easy prey’.
The gang’s victim said at the time: ‘I just stayed quiet because I thought they would kill me if I screamed.’ Last year the trio, then all aged 20, were jailed for a total of 31 years after being convicted of rape.
Ahmed cruelly blew a kiss at the victim’s family shortly before the sentence was delivered. A source told the Daily Mail that he and Abedi used to hang around together on the south Manchester estates where they lived.