THE MAKING OF A MASS MURDERER
In the CCTV footage, Salman Abedi looks almost nonchalant, with his hands thrust into his Hollister bodywarmer, said the Daily Mail. Yet moments after these images were captured, the 22-year-old detonated the nail bomb he was carrying in his rucksack, killing 22 people, and maiming scores more, in the foyer of the Manchester Arena. We now know that the attack was long in the planning: back in March, Abedi rented a flat which he is believed to have used as a bomb factory. He is thought to have made the bomb alone, but the police have not ruled out the possibility that he had help, and have detained several people, including his older brother. His younger brother and his father have also been arrested, by officials in Libya.
Like so many before him, Abedi seemed an unlikely jihadi, said The Guardian. Friends from his youth in Manchester’s Moss Side remember a none-too-bright teenager who smoked cannabis, drank, and listened to rap and grime music. He was prone to anger, but one of his teachers said he showed no signs of a murderous future: he was merely a “dislikeable” boy who “refused to complete his homework ontime”. On the other hand, he had close ties to militancy: hisfather, Ramadan, had by some accounts been a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an armed Islamist group with links to al-qa’eda, which opposed Colonel Gaddafi’s tyrannical regime. In the 1990s, Ramadan and his wife, like thousands of other dissidents, fled Libya, sought asylum in Britain (which then regarded Libya as a pariah state) and settled in Manchester, where Salman was born in 1994.
The turning point for Abedi seems to have come when his father went back to Libya, during a period of reconciliation between Gaddafi and his opponents, said The Sunday Times. Then 13, Abedi stayed in Manchester, but visited Tripoli when he was 16 – by which time the peace had broken down, and his father was engaged in the anti-gaddafi uprising. Abedi took up arms, too, and – during subsequent school holidays – he is believed to have fought with an Islamist faction in the civil war that later engulfed Libya. By then, Islamic State had declared its caliphate, attracting hundreds, maybe thousands of British extremists to fight in Syria, Iraq and Libya. Quite possibly, Abedi also fought for IS in Syria. In the years after, it was evident that Abedi was being radicalised, said The Observer. In Manchester, he reportedly punched a girl for wearing a short skirt; he became involved in a violent, death-exalting gang culture, and – having shrugged off his father’s anti-isis allegiances – was so vocal in his support of Islamic State that he was reported several times to the anti-terrorism hotline. This April, he went back to Libya, where his father (who claims to have no truck with global jihad) was so concerned by his state of mind that he confiscated his passport. Abedi told his family he needed it back to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Instead, on 17 May, he set off for the UK, but travelled via Istanbul and Düsseldorf, raising suspicions that he was plugged into a European jihadist network.
Why did the security services not pick him up? Clearly, they missed several chances, said Chris Stephen in The Guardian: members of Britain’s Libyan diaspora have been warning the authorities about Islamic radicalisation in Manchester for years. The city was known to be fertile ground for IS recruiters. But they couldn’t track every potential jihadi, said Niall Ferguson in The Sunday Times. Intelligence officials say there are 23,000 Islamic extremists in Britain, some 3,000 of whom are believed to pose a threat. One was always going to get through.
Still, our spymasters have questions to answer, said Sam Jones in the FT. In the run-up to the Arab Spring, they were aware that British Libyans were joining the fighting in Libya: indeed, they facilitated their journeys, to swell the anti-gaddafi opposition. Despite their affiliations to Islamist groups, the returnees were believed to be focused on waging a jihad in their home country, and to pose no threat to the UK. Intelligence officials failed to consider the impact on hot-headed young men of taking up arms in a bloody war, in a lawless country populated by Islamists from all over the region and beyond. They should have foreseen that this war, like that in Syria, would create a cohort of Britons brutalised by conflict, skilled in the tools of warfare, alienated from their former communities, and connected instead to “transnational networks of fellow fighters by powerful bonds of kinship and shared suffering”.
“Abedi was so vocal in his support of IS that he was reported several times to the anti-terrorism hotline”