Manchester marks week since attack as questions grow
MANCHESTER, Uni t ed Kingdom: A bel l tol led in Manchester on Monday at the exact time when a suicide bomber struck a week before outside a teenage pop concert killing 22 people, as Britain’s intelligence agency questioned whether vital clues had been missed.
Hundreds braved the rain in the northwest English city for a silent vigil at 2131 GMT amid floral tributes, candles and teddy bears to honour the victims, who included six children.
As the number of people detained in Britain rose to 14, following an arrest early Monday morning, police also released new CCTV images of 22-year- old attacker Salman Abedi carrying a large suitcase and appealed for information about the luggage.
Abedi detonated his bomb just after the end of a concert by US pop star Ariana Grande in one of Europe’s biggest indoor arenas in central Manchester. Many of the victims were either young concert- goers or parents waiting to take their children home.
A total of 116 people were injured in the attack, by Manchesterborn Abedi, a university dropout of Libyan origin, 19 of whom remain in critical condition.
The Islamic State jihadist group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
“You t ried to dest roy us but you’ve brought us closer together,” read one message of defiance left among the tributes in central Manchester, which included heart- shaped balloons and runners’ bibs lef t by participants in a half-marathon on Sunday.
Invest igators meanwhi le pushed ahead with their probe.
Police could be seen conducting a search at a rubbish tip near Manchester and they released images of Abedi carrying a blue suitcase hours before the attack, asking the public where and when they might have seen him with it in the preceding days.
“We have no reason to believe the case and its contents contain anything dangerous, but would ask people to be cautious,” the police said in a statement, stressing that the suitcase was di f ferent from the backpack Abedi used in the attack.
Abedi is bel ieved to have returned from a trip to Libya a few days before the bombing and had also recently transited through airports in Istanbul and Dusseldorf in Germany.
The latest person held was a 23- year- old man arrested in the southern coastal town of Shoreham-by- Sea, more than 400 kilometres from Manchester.
Fourteen men are now detained on UK soil in the investigation, while Abedi’s father and brother have been held in Libya, where officials said the two brothers were IS jihadists.
None of the men arrested in Britain have so far been charged with any crime and police have up to 14 days in which to do so under special anti- terrorism laws. — AFP