NOW BROTHER MUST FACE JUSTICE
Two brothers were saved by the Royal Navy from warzone. Today, one is dead after his devastating attack on Manchester — the other sits in a Libyan jail fighting to avoid justice
THE Manchester bomber wasn’t the only member of his family to be rescued by the Royal Navy on that day in August 2014.
Salman Abedi’s brother Hashem was also picked up by brave servicemen – to return to Britain and play a key role in the atrocity carried out by Salman.
Hashem – alleged to have helped to buy materials for the Manchester bomb – is back in Libya, languishing in prison in Tripoli under a militia guard as the Libyan and British governments wrangle over his extradition to the UK.
He is being held by the Special Deterrence Force, also known as Rada, at a sprawling base at Mitiga airport. Discussions on bringing him back to Britain are believed to have stalled. When the brothers
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While his Manchester classmates were embarking on A-levels, Abedi was taking up arms on a ‘gap year’ at the front line. The teenager had allegedly been taken to Libya by his father Ramadan Abedi to fight in the revolution.
Mr Abedi Snr was rejoicing in the 2011 uprising against Gaddafi. He had been an active opponent of the Libyan tyrant in the early 1990s, and when he was forced to flee the regime, he was given political refuge in Manchester where his second son Salman was born on New Year’s Eve 1994.
Friends said Salman Abedi grew up a typical teenager, supporting Manchester United and enjoying parties, drinking and smoking cannabis. He was teased with the nickname Dumbo at school for his big ears.
But when the revolution against Gaddafi erupted, his father seized the chance to take him back to his homeland to join the battle against the despot.
Mr Abedi had long been a prominent member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a militant organisation founded to pursue the violent overthrow of Gaddafi’s dictatorship and establish an Islamist state.
Many of its followers had waged jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviets, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s their aims overlapped significantly with British foreign policy. Britain had cut off diplomatic ties with Gaddafi’s regime after Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie and policewoman Yvonne Fletcher was murdered in London.
It was even claimed – although denied – that MI6 encouraged a coup attempt in 1996 by the Islamist group.
Either way, by the early Nineber, ties, many senior members of the LIFG were being pursued by Gaddafi and given sanctuary by Britain, with many settling in Manchester.
Among them was Mr Abedi, a one- time employee of Libya’s notorious secret police, who fled first to Saudi Arabia in 1991 and then to Britain a year later.
Mr Abedi and his wife Samia Tabbal – described as an incredibly bright nuclear engineer who graduated top of her class from Tripoli university – lived in the Whalley Range district of Manchester on the same street as another LIFG mem-
‘Given sanctuary by Britain’
‘Slow and unintelligent’
Abd al- Baset Azzouz, an expert bomb-maker.
But life for the LIFG veterans in Manchester started to get uncomfortable in 1999 when Tony Blair began the process of bringing Gaddafi in from the cold.
Diplomatic relations were resumed and sanctions were lifted. But in Manchester, the old LIFG warriors found their organisation designated as a terror group by the UN and the Home Office. Many of the Libyans living in Britain were placed under control orders.
Then came the Arab Spring in 2011, and Britain turned its back on Gaddafi once more.
David Cameron’s government sent warplanes to support the uprising against him. British-Libyans queued up to return home to join the fight. Ramadan Abedi swiftly signed up to the cause.
In the years that followed, Salman and Hashem, divided their time between Manchester and the war in Libya, using their British passports to travel freely between the two. Their parents relocated to Tripoli, effectively leaving the boys to look after themselves in the UK.
Salman quit Manchester College in 2013 with ‘anger management issues’ after punching a girl for wearing a short skirt and telling the head teacher there were ‘a lot of things going on’ with his family and ‘fighting in Libya’.
Friends said he was ‘ slow and unintelligent’, a heavy cannabis user and increasingly violent to women. In 2014, he was back in Libya when full- blown war returned following the June parliamentary elections that squeezed the Islamist factions to a minority of seats.
Rather than accept the result, Islamist leaders accused the new parliament of being dominated by supporters of the dictator and battled the nationalist militia.
By August, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates were launching airstrikes against the Islamists who had seized control of Tripoli airport. To make matters even more chaotic, fanatics from the Islamic State group were establishing a stronghold in coastal areas, broadcasting gruesome videos of their self-proclaimed warriors beheading captured Christians.
It was around this time that the Royal Navy ship was dispatched to help Britons make their escape from the hellish situation. Salman and Hashem – who had been spending the summer in Tripoli with their family – took their chance to join the evacuation. Back in Manchester, Abedi enrolled at Salford University, collecting about £7,000 from the taxpayerfunded Student Loans Company. He pocketed the money and dropped out.
By now Salman – who was chanting in the streets and putting the bins out wearing Islamic robes – had become fully radicalised.
He used the taxpayers’ cash to help bankroll his terror plot, travelling to and from Libya where he
became increasingly battle hardened. Then on May 22 last year, he took his explosives-packed rucksack bearing a logo of the Union Flag and wrought terrible carnage on the country that gave his parents safe haven and rescued him from a war zone.
Hashem, 21, was arrested in a remote farmhouse outside the Libyan capital a day after the suicide bombing in May last year.
The British government requested in October last year that he be extradited to face trial over the massacre. He is separately facing allegations that he was part of a plot to kill a British ambassador in Libya. Hashem is held is in a prison section specifically for IS suspects, of which there are around 250. His father Ramadan, was also detained outside his home in a Tripoli suburb but later released.
British police believe Hashem helped his brother buy the materials to build the bomb detonated at Manchester Arena. He has also been linked to a suicide plot to kill Peter Millett, the UK’s envoy to Libya. But in May this year senior Libyan sources told the Mail that Hashem could escape UK justice by refusing to face trial here.