Blast still haunts me, says friend of bomber
CONVICTED TERRORIST SAYS HE HAD NO INVOLVEMENT IN ATTACK
A CONVICTED terrorist friend of Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi has told the public inquiry into the atrocity the killing of 22 innocents is still ‘haunting me.’
Abdalraouf Abdallah, 28, from Moss Side, said he was behind bars at HMP Altcourse on Merseyside when he heard on the radio about the devastating May 2017 attack.
When he learned that his friend Salman Abedi was behind the slaughter, he said he was ‘crying, confused and shocked.’
He said armed jihad and martyrdom were allowed in Islam but he insisted ‘killing innocent people’ as part of a suicide attack was forbidden.
Abdallah was arrested in November 2014 and charged with assisting others in committing acts of terrorism by facilitating travel and raising money to enable various others to participate in the civil war in Syria.
In May 2016, he was convicted and sentenced to a nine-and-a-half-year extended determinate sentence. He remains behind bars but continues to deny he was an Islamic State recruiter.
An inquiry-commissioned expert on radicalisation, Dr Matthew Wilkinson, believes Abdallah was responsible for ‘grooming Salman Abedi into the violent, Islamist, extremist world view.’
At the independent inquiry yesterday, Abdallah said: “When it happened, I heard it on the radio in prison and I called my friend Elyas. I was crying, confused and shocked.”
He added: “What happened to Salman it’s something I cannot never ever ever take it out of my mind. It’s haunting me until now because he’s my friend and the Salman that I knew, he had never spoken about something like that or do anything horrific like that.”
Abdallah, who was paralysed from the waist down after being injured in 2011 during the Libya uprising, spoke from a wheelchair in the witness stand in court. Abedi visited Abdallah in prison in February 2015 while he was awaiting trial, and once again after he was jailed in January 2017.
Manchester-born Abdallah, who has a Libyan father, used an ‘illicit’ mobile phone while he was in prison in early 2017 to attempt to call Abedi, but has insisted he had nothing to do with the attack or radicalising the bomber.
The inquiry heard that Abdallah used the illicit phone to call Salman Abedi’s number for four minutes and 28 seconds on January 16, 2017.
The illicit device was also used to call Salman Abedi’s phone for four minutes and 17 seconds on January 24, 2017.
He dismissed as a coincidence that the calls happened on days Salman Abedi, and his jailed co-conspirator brother Hashem, were using a contact to source bomb chemicals and get those chemicals delivered.