Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
ARENA & TUBE BOMBER ‘PRISON ATTACK’
THE Manchester Arena and Parsons Green terrorists have both been charged with attacking a prison officer.
Mass murderer Hashem Abedi, 23, is said to have assaulted a guard at HMP Belmarsh last May.
Th e i n c i d en t c a me t w o months after he was found guilty by an Old Bailey jury of helping his brother Salman, 22, carry out his suicide attack, which killed 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert in May 2017.
Also charged with Abedi over the alleged assault at the prison in South East London is Ahmed Hassan, 21, who carried out the Parsons Green bomb attack on an underground train in the capital in September 2017.
The pair, with a third man, Muhammed Saeed, have been charged with assault causing actual bodily harm.
Saeed, 22, is awaiting sentence after he adm itted possessing terrorist documents. They are due to appear before Bromley magistrates on April 7.
Abedi, from Manchester, who was jailed for l i f e wi t h a minimum of 55 years last August, is also charged with assaulting a second prison officer during the incident on May 11.
He was extradited from Libya, where his parents live, to stand trial for the Manchester attack.
Abedi insisted he had played no part in the bomb plot, denying 22 counts of murder, attempted murder and plotting to cause an explosion likely to endanger life.
But the jury convicted him of all th e of fences. He f inal ly admitted playing “a full and knowing part” in the atrocity when interviewed last October at Frankland Prison, County Durham, by lawyers for the official inquiry into the bombing. Ahmed Hassan was jailed for life with a minimum of 34 years in March 2018 after being found guilty of attempted murder over the Parsons Green attack.
The Iraqi asylum seeker had built a bomb at his foster parents’ home in Sunbury, Surrey. He placed it in a carrier bag and left it on the f loor of a District Line train carriage, which was packed with 93 commuters at the time. Hassan got off one stop before Parsons Green, where the device, which was packed with 2kg of screwdrivers, knives, nuts and bolts, partially exploded. It burst into a fireball , l eaving 23 p e opl e with burn injuries.
Another 28 people suffered crush injuries in the aftermath.