Abedi’s father ‘was member of group with al-qaeda links’
Libyan exile was involved with militant group that was founded to use violence in overthrow of Gaddafi regime and tried to assassinate the dictator in 1990s
THE father of Salman Abedi was a member of an al-qaeda-linked militant group that attempted to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi in the Nineties, it was claimed yesterday.
Ramadan Abedi was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a militant organisation founded in 1995 to pursue the violent overthrow of Gaddafi’s dictatorship, Abdel-basit Haroun, a former Libyan security official, claimed.
Mr Abedi, who lived in Britain for more than a decade in the 1990s and 2000s but now lives in Libya with other members of the family, denied the allegation.
“We don’t believe in killing innocents. This is not us,” Mr Abedi, 51, told the AP news agency.
He made the comments shortly before he and one of his sons, Hachim Abedi, were arrested in Tripoli by security forces loyal to the Un-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA).
The arrest of Mr Abedi was carried out by the Rada force, a counter-terrorism group formed by former antigaddafi militia men, reportedly as he was giving an interview on television. It was not clear if the move had been sanctioned by other branches of Libya’s fractious GNA.
A spokesman for the group said Hachim Abedi was suspected of links with Isil, which claimed responsibility for the attack in Manchester.
Earlier, Ramadan Abedi spoke out in defence of his elder son, telling reporters that he could not believe reports Salman Abedi was behind the attack and saying that his son never expressed sympathy for jihadist terrorism.
“I was really shocked when I saw the news, I still don’t believe it,” Mr Abedi told Bloomberg. “Until now my son is a suspect, and the authorities haven’t come up with a final conclusion.”
He said he last saw his son several days ago in Tripoli, the capital of Libya, when Salman told his mother he was planning a pilgrimage to Mecca.
He strongly denied suspecting his son of radicalisation, saying Salman was only “as religious as any child who opens his eyes in a religious family”.
“Every father knows his son and his thoughts; my son does not have extremist thoughts,” he said.
“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.”
Ramadan Abedi, who was born in 1965, was an officer in Muammar Gaddafi’s internal security service until he fled the country in the early Nineties. He arrived in the UK in 1993 and, like many Libyan exiles, settled in south Manchester, where Salman was born in 1994.
He returned to Libya in 2008 after a reconciliation deal with the Gaddafi government, and was joined by other members of the family after the dictator was overthrown in 2011.
The LIFG maintained a branch among the Manchester community, according to a member of the Libyan diaspora who declined to be named.
‘I don’t understand how he’d have become involved in an attack that led to the killing of children’
‘Every father knows his son and his thoughts; my son does not have extremist thoughts’
There are no previously documented links between the LIFG, which formally disbanded in 2011, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).
However, the group is proscribed in Britain and had long established links with al-qaeda, the terrorist group founded by Osama bin Laden.
The Home Office describes the group as “part of the wider global Islamist extremist movement, as inspired by al-qaeda” whose goal is to “replace the current Libyan regime with a hard-line Islamic state”.
Its activities included at least one failed assassination attempt on Gaddafi in the Nineties.
The Government launched a crackdown on the group after Tony Blair and Gaddafi struck the controversial “deal in the desert” in 2004, leading to the rendition of several of the group’s leaders to Libya.
They included Abdel-hakim Belhaj, the former leader of the group and now head of the conservative Islamist al-watan party, and Khaled al-sharif, another former fighter in Afghanistan who has served as a deputy defence minister in two governments in Tripoli.
In January Mr Belhaj won the right to sue Jack Straw, the former home secretary, over MI6 involvement in his and his pregnant wife’s rendition to Libya in 2004..
In a twist of fate, Britain found itself effectively allied with the group in 2011, when British and French airstrikes supported an armed uprising that led to Gaddafi’s overthrow.
Mr Belhaj and Mr Sharif are among several LIFG figures who have risen to prominent positions in Libya since, including in the Un-backed government in Tripoli.
The link with Britain and the West prompted one of Libya’s most powerful armed factions to accuse the UK of supporting the very terrorists who plotted the Manchester bombing.
The Tobruk-led Libyan Government, which is not recognised by the United Nations but controls a large swathe of eastern Libya, said in a statement: “The Libyan Fighting Group … has been recruiting Libyan and Muslim youth in the UK and Europe and sending them to Libya and other countries to deliver terrorism and death.”
It added: “The previous British government has been pressuring in every way possible the prevalence of these groups and their control of Libya.”
The statement appeared to refer to British support for the Un-backed GNA, a fragile compromise government which includes several rival factions.
The Tobruk-based government, which is effectively controlled by the Russian and Egyptian-backed renegade general Khalifa Haftar, does not recognise the Tripoli-based GNA, which it says is dominated by extremists.
Gen Haftar’s Libyan National Army is the largest of an estimated 1,700 armed factions operating in the country.
The groups include the Shura Council of Mujahideen in Derna, an Islamist militia founded by a former LIFG fighter that has fought both Isil and the LNA.
Isil was forced out of strongholds in Derma and Sirte in 2016, and has held no significant territory in Libya since.
“There is no reason why the former leaders of the LIFG, such as Abdelhakim Belhadj, would attack the UK,” said Mohamed Eljahr, an analyst at the Atlantic Council.
“But, whether indirectly or directly they must have had a role. The ideology they push – supporting the Benghazi Defence Brigades and radical thought – indirectly or directly they are feeding support into Islamists.”