City where one of the world’s most wanted jihadis hid away

THE Facebook account of Ramadan Abedi, father of the Manchester bomber, featured an image of a bearded man, with ‘A Lion’ written underneath.

It was a photograph of his friend Abu Anas, who lived near his family in Manchester, socialised with them, and had emerged from the same extremist circles in Libya years before.

The families were so close that Ramadan Abedi’s wife – a 50-year-old nuclear engineer called Samia Tabbal – was best pals with Abu Anas’s wife, whom she had met while at Tripoli University. For a time, the two women even shared a flat.

Yet the man lauded by bomber Salman Abedi’s father on his Facebook page was no innocent friend. Anas had a sinister past, with links into the heart of Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terror group. Named by President George W Bush as one of the 22 most dangerous people in the world, Anas fled Manchester in May 2000 just before an MI5 raid of his flat following a tip-off from the FBI.

He was accused by the US of being Al Qaeda’s number one computer expert, a member of its ruling council, and a central figure in the plotting of the 1998 American Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania which killed 224.

The nuclear engineer, who had also trained at Tripoli University, left behind on his computer a copy of the official training manual for Al Qaeda terrorists. It detailed how to wage a Holy War on the streets of Britain. It gave intricate details of how to makes explosives, mix poisons, carry out urban killings and become a suicide bomber.

Anas made first for Afghanistan, then disappeared off the map. He had been given political asylum in the UK in 1995 after being implicated in a failed Al Qaeda plot to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. He had been arrested as a terror suspect by UK police in 1999 but had been able to clear his computer hard-drive of all damning evidence. A 2002 book by two French intelligence experts alleged that Anas had been told by MI6 he could stay – on condition that he helped with another assassination plot, this time with Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi as the target.

It was not until 2013 – two years after Gaddafi was deposed – that Anas was finally caught by US commandos, having slipped back to his family in Libya. He was taken to America, where he was weeks away from standing trial for terrorism offences when he died of liver failure in 2015.

After Anas was seized, his wife admitted he had been an Al Qaeda member but said he was never a senior leader and broke with Bin Laden when he got to know men affiliated with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), who had a common vision to overthrow the Gaddafi regime.

That was a vision shared by Ramadan Abedi. The 51-year-old was arrested for questioning on Wednesday in Libya after his son’s murderous attack. Abedi was listed in the files of Libyan secret police as belonging to the LIFG, which fought for years to get rid of Gaddafi and create an Islamic government. A source with knowledge of the LIFG said yesterday that Abedi – like his friend Anas – was an important member.

Both men are remembered in Manchester as being deeply religious, encouraging their children to go to the mosque regularly and not to fill their heads with Western distractions.

Anas’s son Abdullah al-Ruqai, 25, said: ‘My father was a good Muslim. In Manchester, he did not encourage us to follow football, he wanted us to learn the Koran.’ He also remembers the MI5 raid on the family’s flat in 2000, when he was only nine.

The links between the Abedis and Anas are chilling, given the Manchester Arena attack.

And they again raise the question of why Salman Abedi was able to hide his hate-filled extremism in plain sight for so long.

‘He didn’t want us to watch football’