Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Arena bomber’s parents revealed as plot suspects
Couple among six sought for questioning
THE parents of suicide bomber Salman Abedi are among six people detectives want to question over the Manchester Arena bombing, a legal ruling reveals.
Abedi’s father, Ramadan Abedi, and mother, Samia Tabbal, are among four suspects, while police want to trace and eliminate two other people from their investigation.
Police had sought to restrict the information being released during the ongoing public inquiry into the 2017 terror attack but the application was successfully opposed by media organisations, backed by bereaved families.
Inquiry chairman Sir John Saunders decided the information would not give rise to a risk of prejudice to future criminal investigations.
Four of the people are wanted as suspects. Two others are described as “trace/interview/eliminate subjects”.
Earlier this year, Abedi’s brother, Hashem, was jailed for a minimum of 55 years for the murders of 22 people in the bombing after he helped his older sibling plan the attack.
Ramadan Abedi is wanted for questioning after his fingerprints were found inside a Nissan Micra car which the brothers used to store explosives. Police want to quiz Samia Tabbal in relation to comments made by two other people. The car was purchased to store the lethal material, which the brothers had previously kept in a flat rented in order to prepare their bomb.
Ramadan and Samia flew from the UK to Libya in April 2017 and have not returned since.
The two other named suspects, Mohammed Soliman and Elyas Elmehdi, are also out of the country.
During Hashem Abedi’s trial it emerged that Soliman was a pal of the Abedi brothers, who approached him to buy chemicals on their behalf.
The Nissan Micra, to which Salman Abedi returned to collect materials shortly before the bombing, was parked outside Elmehdi’s thenaddress in Rusholme, Manchester.
Elmehdi was previously questioned but later released and has now reportedly f l ed to Li bya aft er b ein g convicted in his absence of serious drug offences and jailed for four years.
On what was meant to be day one of Hashem’s trial i n January, Elmehdi posted an i mage of himself online stating “they can tell you how I was restricted to doing bits” with an emoji of two champagne glasses.
He later posted a photo of himself holding a firearm sitting on a vehicle bearing the logo of a military operation organised by the “Government of National Accord” in Tripoli, which is battling other groups in the Libyan civil war. Police also want to trace
Majdi Alamari, who is in Libya, and Anas Abuhdaima, whose whereabouts in Britain are unknown. Abuhdaima, originally from Manchester, was in the city after the bombing and was convicted of a driving offence there in December 2017.
The beginning of the inquiry in September heard the Abedi family had refused to help in the process.