On his way to slaughter, pop concert jihadist in a baseball cap

WEARING spectacles, a baseball cap and a trendy body warmer, Manchester suicide bomber Salman Abedi could have passed for one of the thousands of students who live in the city as he calmly headed towards the concert venue he targeted.

The image was released by police as counter-terror officers continued to reconstruct Abedi’s movements between returning to the UK from Libya, where his parents live, on May 18 and last Monday night’s atrocity at Manchester Arena.

They did not say precisely when this picture was taken but hope its release will jog the memory of anyone who may have seen the terrorist on the night.

Chillingly, it shows Abedi with his left hand in his jacket pocket, perhaps close to the detonator of his bomb. The straps of his backpack – containing the deadly device and the nuts and bolts that killed 22 – are visible.

The picture is the first to show the murderer wearing glasses.

Greater Manchester Police revealed that 1,000 officers are working on the inquiry, pursuing more than 1,500 ‘actions’ and examining 13,000 hours of CCTV.

Detectives said one of the last places Abedi went was the rented flat they believe was used as the ‘final assembly place for the device’.

Police have said that the investigation – the biggest counterterror probe since the London Tube bombings of 2005 – identified Abedi as the person responsible within two hours of the bomb going off.

Senior officers said in a statement on Saturday night that it was ‘a large scale, fast-moving investigation’.