Why do so many believe the Manchester Arena terror attack didn’t happen?
As two survivors of the Ariana Grande attack, which killed 22 people in 2017, sue a man for harassment, author ABIGAIL DEAN writes exclusively about the alarming rise in the conspiracy theorists who deny the shocking reality of terror attacks
THE murderer, ordinary enough, makes his first appearance on CCTV footage in Victoria Station. He wears glasses, a cap, white trainers and a black tracksuit. He carries a backpack that – in hindsight – is impossible to unsee. At the time, it must have appeared onerous, the kind of bag you’d take on a hike or joke about climbing Everest if a friend wore it.
After arriving at the Manchester Arena, the killer hides in the toilets, waiting for the moment his heinous crime will have its greatest impact. He is last seen in the foyer, surrounded by men, women and children.
They are looking for friends or family, buzzing from the Ariana Grande performance they’ve just enjoyed.
At 10.31pm, he detonates a 30kg nail bomb, killing 22 people, the youngest just eight years old, and wounding hundreds more.
Suddenly, there is no more talk of songs or outfits. There is only smoke and panic, ambulances and firearms – a great, terrible schism between what the night had held and how it ended. In a surreal moment, some crowd members flee clutching the giant pink balloons released from the rafters mere seconds before the explosion.
Almost seven years on, the terrible details of what happened to children, teenagers and adults at an Ariana Grande concert on May 22, 2017, remain stark. Suicide bomber Salman Abedi, who had returned to the UK from Libya four days before the attack, was the man pictured calm and composed on CCTV. Though we will never be able to ask him why, it is clear he intended to kill and maim as many lives as possible on that night.
And yet, shockingly, there are some people who today do not believe the attack happened.
Not content to keep their thoughts to themselves, they have spread malicious rumours online. And, in the most extreme cases, they have targeted survivors and victims’ families.
The best-known among these troubling figures is Richard D Hall, who attempted to film and photograph those who had survived the Manchester Arena attack, observing whether their daily movements were consistent with their injuries.
The 56-year-old son of a chicken farmer, Hall claims the attack was a “deep-state” plot and that many of the injured were simply “crisis actors”, playing a scripted role.
He has written a book, made a film and given talks on the subject – with millions of online views and tens of thousands of YouTube subscribers.
His YouTube account has since been removed. Many of those reported to have died, Hall has claimed, might have “started new lives abroad”; others “may have perished before the concert due to accidents or natural causes”. In February, two victims of the attack won their application for a summary judgment against him.
The judge found the facts of the bombing and the victims’ injuries could not be disputed. One of these victims, Eve Hibbert, then 14, had suffered a life-changing brain injury. Cruelly, Hall had visited her home and recorded footage of her, her mother, and her carer, with the aim of investigating her condition. While it’s easy to ascribe these beliefs to a few fringe individuals – people who hide behind avatars and spend New Year’s Eve awaiting the apocalypse – 2022 research from the BBC and King’s College found a shocking 19 per cent of the UK population did not believe the victims of terrorist attacks were telling the truth about what happened to them.
It’s clear that, if we’re to understand where conspiracy theories come from – and how they spread – we have to leave behind the stereotype of the tin-hat-wearing basementdweller, and look at our friends, relatives – and perhaps even ourselves.
I’ve been researching conspiracy theories for some time. My new novel, Day One, follows the conspiracies that arise in the aftermath of an attack at a school in an idyllic Lake District town. The main character is a conspiracy theorist, an isolated and lost everyman who becomes increasingly determined to expose the true events of the day.
Creating this character, I had to set aside my disgust and unease, and try to understand how conspiracy theories become an obsession.
I worked on my book during the Covid-19 pandemic, as conspiracy theories about lockdown and vaccines spread across the internet. And the prevalence of conspiracy theories during those dark times holds a number of clues as to their origin.
Human beings have always loved to use stories to order the universe and the pandemic was a particularly disorderly time.
Speculation about microchips in vaccines and miracle cures for the virus provided an odd sense of comfort at a time of unprecedented uncertainty.
And this is the case with conspiracy theories following human atrocities, too.
In journalist Elizabeth Williamson’s examination of conspiracy theories following the attack on Sandy Hook Elementary, America, in 2012 – a gunman killed 20 children and six staff members at the Connecticut school – she noted that: “Many of [the first doubters] were young mothers who could not come to grips with the murder of so many children so young.”
Several grieving families were subsequently
‘The judge found the facts of the bombing and the victims’ injuries could not be disputed’
forced to relocate due to harassment by conspiracy theorists, but Williamson’s explanation ascribes those doubters with an awful, misguided innocence.
A hoax by the US government, allegedly to help justify its anti-firearms agenda, was a much more comforting tale than the mass murder of innocent children.
WHILE the world shut down, the internet stayed open, and online contagion is a crucial element of conspiracy theories. That same 2022 study by the BBC and King’s College found a correlation between those who get their news from social media networks and a tendency to believe in conspiracy theories.
Online, you become vulnerable to your own extremism; some research has found that YouTube’s algorithm, for instance, can direct users towards ever-more extremist content, sending them down dark rabbit holes of conspiracy theories.
And it happens fast.
Speculation about what happened and why began almost immediately
‘Research found 19 per cent of people did not believe victims of terror attacks were telling the truth’
after news of the Manchester Arena terror attack broke.
Rufus Hound, a comedian who appears on Celebrity Juice, retweeted a post commenting that the timing of the attack was “fortunate for [Theresa] May”.
At the time, the Labour Party was making moderate gains ahead of June’s election. The post implied the Prime Minister had allowed or orchestrated the attack to secure a swing back to the Conservatives, who were running with harder pro-defence policies. Hound used the hashtag #ReichstagFire, a reference to the arson at Germany’s parliament that allowed the Nazi party to abolish certain constitutional protections – and which some attribute to the Nazis themselves. He later issued a grovelling apology. It’s a missive with all of the trademarks of a conspiracy theory: cowardly vagueness, world order intrigue, and disregard for those people affected by the atrocity. But a celebrity’s idle online speculation is possible to ignore. Far more insidious were the conspiracy theorists who reached beyond the confines of the internet to contact survivors themselves.
I know Manchester Arena well. Back in the 1990s and Noughties, when I was growing up in Derbyshire and attending school in Stockport, it was the MEN Arena. I attended my first concert there and didn’t sit down all evening.
When you’re a teenage girl, awkward and uncertain, fumbling for the person you may want to be, there is a particular magic in seeing women on stage in all their beauty and glory. It’s a glimpse of what it is possible to become and it would have been much the same for the thousands of teenagers on that fateful early summer night.
I first read news of the attack on my phone the following morning.
My first thought was for my 18-year-old cousin, living in Manchester and a huge Ariana Grande fan. She messaged me back right away.
No, she had not been at the concert. She had decided against going when an A-level exam was scheduled for the following day.
When you encounter a near-miss like this, there’s relief.
Mixed in with this is the guilt and horror for another family, alike in every way, who were not so lucky.
But imagine having to factor in contending with an army of people intent on trying to erase your tragedy and discredit your name – it doesn’t bear thinking about. Sadly, it seems as if conspiracy theories are here to stay. Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee, touring the US with speeches that call the convicted Capitol building rioters “hostages”. His mantra of “fake news” has become a rallying cry to the permanently disaffected.
More recently, after stepping out of the public eye for abdominal surgery, the Princess ofWales was the target of weeks of outlandish untruths, before eventually sharing her cancer diagnosis with the world.
We could do worse than remembering that we are all human. Conspiracy theorists are not always deranged fools, and their victims are people who have undergone trauma and tragedy: inconsistencies are to be expected.
It is much harder to fight the real ills of the world – terrorism, sickness, warfare – if we must first squabble over their existence.