Bomber’s brother ‘knew all about vile plot over a month ago’
THE brother of the Manchester bomber knew he was going to carry out the atrocity more than a month ago, Libyan police claimed last night. Engineering student Hashem Abedi was being interrogated last night in Tripoli over claims he helped his older brother Salman build the explosive device.
The brothers’ father was also arrested in Libya yesterday.
Hashem, 20, has confessed to knowing about the attack when he visited his suicide bomber brother’s Manchester home in April, Libyan counter-terrorism officers said.
Detectives said Hashem had links to Islamic State and was planning to carry out a terror attack in Tripoli.
He was seized at gunpoint during a raid on his home by Tripoli’s Special Deterrent Force (SDF) on Tuesday night – a day after his brother killed 22 concert goers in Manchester. At the time he was said to be trying to obtain a £2,500 money transfer sent by his brother before the bombing.
The brothers’ father Ramadan, 51, was also arrested in Libya yesterday afternoon – hours after insisting his son Salman, 22, had nothing to do with the suicide bombing in Britain.
The arrests took place after Ramadan’s eldest son Ismail, 23, was held by British police in Manchester on Tuesday afternoon.
Last night the SDF released a picture of Hashem in police custody wearing a blue overall. It said he had been under surveillance for about a month and a half before the Manchester terror attack.
But Libyan detectives are not thought to have told their British counterparts about the operation because they only suspected Hashem of planning an attack in Tripoli.
An SDF spokesman said: ‘Hashem confessed to being in the UK while the terrorist operation was being planned. And it is clear that he was fully aware of all the details of the [Manchester] terrorist operation.
‘It is also important to note that Hashem left the UK on April 16 and said he was in constant contact with his brother, the executor of the operation.’
Last night it emerged that the father of the British-born boys has publicly voiced his support for an extremist group fighting in Syria.
He posted photos of soldiers clad in black uniforms from the Al-Nusra Front, which was the official Syrian branch of Al Qaeda until it broke up last July, on his Facebook page five years ago. Underneath the photo, he wrote: ‘Victorious against the infidels... say Amen!’
Ramadan, a former airport security worker in the UK, also published a picture of Hashem holding a machine gun while wearing a Nike T-shirt and combat trousers. Underneath the picture he wrote: ‘The lion Hashem... is training.’
And in another post, he incited his followers to rise up against soldiers who served under former dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
Last night a former Libyan security official claimed the father had been a member of a former Al Qaeda-backed group in Libya.
According to the Associated Press news agency, ex-Libyan security official Abdel-Basit Haroun said he personally knew Ramadan, and that he had been a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) in the 1990s. The group had links to Al Qaeda.
Although the LIFG has since disbanded, Mr Haroun alleged the father belonged to the Salafi Jihadi movement,
‘Victorious against the infidels’
the most extreme sect of Salafism and from which Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group hail.
Ramadan fled Tripoli in 1993 to Saudi Arabia after he was accused of helping Islamists by tipping them off before police raids.
He then claimed political asylum in Britain and lived there for many years, fathering three sons and a daughter, before returning to Libya after Gaddafi was ousted and killed in the country’s 2011 civil war. He went on to become a manager of the Central Security Force in Tripoli, as different factions continued to fight for overall control of the country.
His wife Samia Tabbal, who is a nuclear scientist, is a close friend of the wife of Abu Anas Al-Libi, an Al Qaeda veteran who was snatched off the streets of Tripoli in 2013 by US special forces.
Hours before the dramatic developments, Ramadan Abedi claimed that Salman was not linked to Islamic militants, even though he was named as the Manchester suicide bomber by police and the security services.
He said he spoke to his son last Friday, saying he was getting ready to visit Saudi Arabia and sounded ‘normal’. Proclaiming his son’s innocence, he stated: ‘We don’t believe in killing innocents. This is not us.’
Speaking from his home in Tripoli before his arrest he said: ‘Until now my son is a suspect, and the authorities haven’t come up with a final conclusion.
‘Every father knows his son and his thoughts, my son does not have extremist thoughts. I was really shocked when I saw the news, I still don’t believe it.
‘My son was as religious as any child who opens his eyes in a religious family.
‘As we were discussing news of similar attacks earlier, he was always against those attacks, saying there’s no religious justification for them.
‘I don’t understand how he’d have become involved in an attack that led to the killing of children.’
He added: ‘My message to the world is there are hidden hands that want to tarnish the image of Muslims who live in the West.’
The father said that his son had travelled from Britain to Libya several weeks ago and that he was planning to return to spend the holy month of Ramadan with his family. He denied that his son had ever been to Syria.
Ramadan also denied having ties to any of Libya’s militant groups, including the LIFG.
‘This is nonsense,’ he said yesterday, adding that under Gaddafi ‘anyone who went to a mosque raised question marks’.
Investigators are looking into possible links between Ramadan Abedi and Abdalraouf Abdallah, a Libyan refugee from Manchester who was shot in Libya and later jailed in the UK for terror offences, including helping Stephen Gray, a British Iraqi war veteran and Muslim convert, join fighters in Syria.
Yesterday Libyan online newspaper Al-Marsad reported that Ramadan had preached at Didsbury mosque in Manchester before returning to Libya several years ago.
A group of Gaddafi dissidents, who were members of the LIFG, lived within close proximity to his son Salman’s home, in Whalley Range, Greater Manchester.
Among them was Abd al-Baset Azzouz, who left Britain to run a terrorist network in Libya overseen by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s successor as leader of Al Qaeda.
Azzouz, 48, an expert bombmaker, was accused of running an Al Qaeda network in eastern Libya.