Taxpayers’ money used to fund bomb attack at Arena
Danny McKeever
Co-owner of Site Supply Company with business mentor Simon Fowler from the John Lewis Partnership
THE family of Arena bomber Salman Abedi and his brother Hashem Abedi – convicted on Tuesday of helping plot the attack and murdering all 22 vicitms – was given almost £200,000 in state hand-outs in seven years.
Some of that money funded the outrage, it was revealed at Hashem Abedi’s trial.
Their mother Samia Tabbal was paid housing benefit, tax credits and child benefit worth an estimated £190,000 – about £2,200 every month – right up to the time of the 2017 atrocity, even though the parents and younger children left for Libya in October 2016.
Salman Abedi, then doing a business management degree at Salford University, was handed a student loan worth £2,258 on January 20, 2017. It was around this time he and his brother started plotting a terror strike.
The Arena trial heard how Samia’s bank account was used to pay for bomb-making kit as well as groceries for the bomber and his brother.
Even though she wasn’t in the country, some £250 was withdrawn from her HSBC bank account from a newsagents in Rusholme on March 25, 2017.
The jury was told Hashem Abedi went to B&Q in Stockport on March 27, 2017, where the card was used to purchase a Mac claw hammer, a junior hacksaw and ten blades, a pair of ‘tin snips’ and water pump pliers for £40.99.
The next day there were two further large cash withdrawals using the same card in Whalley Range.
The brothers used pliers to cut 20-litre vegetable oil drums to turn them into prototype parts of a bomb.
The trial was told Samia Tabbal received housing benefit for herself, her husband Ramadan Abedi and their six children while they were living in their semi on Elsmore Road in Fallowfield between 2008 and 2011.
The housing benefit stopped in 2011 after the council was informed the family would be leaving the country.
They went back to Libya following the death of ruler Col Muammer Gaddafi amid the Arab Spring uprisings.
However, the family returned and Samia Tabbal started claiming housing benefit for herself and her five youngest children from August 23, 2013.
A copy of Samia Tabbal’s bank statements shown to the jury showed her account was also bolstered by a weekly £302.76 working and child tax credit, and a £61.80 in child benefit.
It meant a total bill to the tax-payer of £27,000 a year (or £524 per week).