BROTHERS IN EVIL
Bomber’s sibling guilty of 22 murders at pop concert
THE brother of the Manchester suicide bomber is facing a life behind bars after being found guilty of 22 murders yesterday.
Hashem Abedi, 22, was convicted of plotting with his brother, Salman, to carry out one of Britain’s deadliest terrorist atrocities.
Although Hashem was 2,000 miles away in Libya when his older sibling detonated his shrapnel-loaded backpack bomb, a jury at London’s Old Bailey found him guilty of the murder of the 22 innocent men, women and children who died.
They agreed with prosecutors that Hashem, who had studied electronics at college, was in on the plot from the start and had stood ‘shoulder to shoulder’ in helping Salman, 22, buy chemicals and build the deadly home-made device.
Today it can be revealed that the younger Abedi, who like his brother was born in the UK and had dual British and Libyan nationality, was only brought back to Britain after a lengthy extradition battle and an alleged £9.2million UK foreign aid bung to the North African country.
In legal discussions not heard by the jury, it emerged that Boris Johnson, who was then the foreign secretary, handed over the money during a visit three months after the May 2017 atrocity.
By then Hashem was being held by militia in Tripoli, having been arrested in the days following the attack, which took place at the end of a concert at Manchester Arena by US pop star Ariana Grande.
Libya had never previously allowed one of its citizens to be extradited to Britain but eventually agreed to give him up over a technicality.
They claimed Hashem had failed to reapply to keep his Libyan citizenship, meaning he was a British national only, so could be returned to face justice.
Hashem’s barrister, Stephen Kamlish QC, told his trial: ‘The then foreign secretary paid a visit to Libya and (in August) the Government was providing £9.2 million aid to Libya. It was only after that that the application for extradition was made... the British were having, in effect, to bribe the Libyans.’
The details were revealed as Hashem’s defence team tried to get his case thrown out by claiming the extradition was unlawful. The Home Office denied any impropriety over the extradition.
Families who lost loved ones broke down and sobbed as the names of the 22 victims were read by the court clerk and a guilty verdict returned on each of them.
Hashem was also found guilty of the attempted murder of survivors and a further charge of conspiracy to cause explosions. The defendant was not in the dock to hear his fate after sacking his defence team and refusing to come to court for several weeks. During the seven-week trial, it emerged that:
The brothers paid for the ingredients for their bomb with taxpayers’ cash from fraudulent benefit claims and student loans;
Salman was allowed to visit a convicted terrorist in jail – despite being on an MI5 watch-list;
Several Libyan friends and relatives of the brothers admitted buying chemicals for them but claimed they had no idea they were being stockpiled for a bomb;
Hashem accused the British Government of being complicit in his torture after MI5 were allegedly alerted to his mistreatment while in a Libyan jail.
Hashem is likely to face a whole life tariff when he is sentenced at a later date.
Speaking in Manchester, where the trial was relayed to relatives and survivors, Paul Hett – whose son Martyn, 29, was killed in the blast – said: ‘This verdict will not bring back the 22 victims murdered by Salman and Hashem Abedi. But what it will do is give an overwhelming sense of justice to all those affected by this heinous crime.’
Daryl Price, whose son John Atkinson, 28, was killed: ‘There is no justice for what Abedi did and there never will be, but it does feel like a weight has been lifted.
‘I am annoyed that he couldn’t make an appearance in court to face those people whose lives he ruined. I had planned to go to London for the verdict, I wanted to look him right in the eye, but he is too much of a coward for that.’
Referring to the £9.2 million ‘bribe’, Robby Potter, 50, who was seriously injured in the bombing, said: ‘If that’s what we had to pay, then that’s what we had to pay.
‘I’m disappointed he [Hashem] wasn’t dragged to court to hear the verdict. He should be kept in isolation’
Another victim of the attack was 14-year-old Eilidh MacLeod from the island of Barra, who was killed by the blast.
Her friend Laura MacIntyre, 16, a pupil at Castlebay Community School on the island, suffered serious hand and leg injuries.
The court heard that the brothers used benefits fraudulently claimed by their nuclear scientist mother, Samia, 52, and student loans to pay for the bomb ingredients. Although mother-of-six Mrs Abedi and her husband, Ramadan, had returned to Libya with their three youngest children in October 2016 – seven
‘Overwhelming sense of justice’
months before the bombing – she continued to be paid more than £2,000 a month in child benefit, tax credits and housing benefit.
Salman and Hashem stayed in the family council house, in the Moss Side district of Manchester, and were left in charge of their mother’s bank account. They used her debit card to buy a £300 battery and tools from B&Q to help them make the bomb.
Despite dropping out of Salford University Salman, who was known to MI5 as early as 2010, also managed to secure more than £5,000 in student loans and grants. He and Hashem used the cash to pay friends, who they persuaded to buy 16 litres of sulphuric acid and 55 litres of hydrogen peroxide.These chemicals are two of the main constituents of triacetone triperoxide or TATP, a highly volatile explosive nicknamed ‘Mother of Satan’ that has been used in terror attacks around the globe.
They also used the money to rent a flat on the opposite side of Manhad chester – nine miles from their home – which they used as a laboratory and experimented with creating the explosive after watching a jihadi video on Facebook.
The brothers, who smoked cannabis on the streets of Manchester and were involved in local gangs,
accumulated enough chemicals for more than one bomb and police said it was possible Hashem was planning his own attack.
The brothers used 11 different mobile phones in five months but disposed of most of them, leaving police little in the way of phone messages or data to go on.
Instead, officers meticulously built a circumstantial case against Hashem, carrying out 1.3million fingerprint comparisons and scrawling through 6 million lines of phone data and 65,000 hours of CCTV video. Police believe Hashem was the last person Salman spoke to for ‘inspiration’ during a phone call outside the arena in the moments before he killed himself.
Detective Chief Superintendent
Simon Barraclough, who led the investigation, said Hashem ‘provided encouragement right up to the end’. ‘This is a man who has been with his brother from start to finish,’ he added. Detectives say the brothers were partly radicalised in Libya and also by a convicted terrorist who Salman visited in jail and spoke to on the phone in the months before the atrocity.
MI5 will likely face questions at the public inquiry into the bombing in June about how Salman was allowed to visit Abdalrauf Abdallah, a wheelchair-bound jihadi described as a ‘Svengali’ to youngsters vulnerable to extremism in Manchester.
The trial heard that Salman visited Abdallah, who was jailed in July 2016, in prison on the same day he bought the first chemicals for his bomb, and received a call from him on an illicit mobile on the day they were delivered.
Although members of the Libyan community in Manchester noticed Salman being friendly with Abdallah – who was paralysed while fighting for a militia in the overthrow of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 – and becoming more religious in his views and dress, nobody reported him to police.
Hashem was arrested in Libya the day after the attack. He denied involvement, but his fingerprints were found on bomb prototypes.
‘He should be kept in isolation’
‘With his brother from start to finish’