A Muslim community worker, who knew the Manchester bomber, said members of the public had reported him to the police five years ago after the teen admitted he thought “being a suicide bomber was ok”.
The unnamed worker told BBC that two people who knew Abedi during his time at secondary school made separate calls to an anti-terrorism hotline.
US defense officials confirmed to Fox News that Salman Abedi spent three weeks in Libya prior to the Manchester bombing, returning to England just days before the Ariana Grande concert Monday, when he launched his attack at the concert venue.
Abedi’s former classmate, who refused to be identified, said he would be “away at random times throughout the year — but I don’t know if that was because he was out the country, or just didn’t show up to school, because he did hang around with the wrong crowd”.
Hamid El-Sayed told BBC Abedi’s academic difficulties were culturally driven. “He had difficulties adjusting to European lifestyle” said Sayed, who worked for the UN on “radical Islam” and now works for the University of Manchester.
In an interview with Sky News a white concertgoer described how she had reported a suspicious Arab women in the audience to security, but was told: “How would you feel if someone had suspected you?” suggesting that she was only complaining because she was a “racist”. The security did nothing about the warnings that the very nervous Arab woman had spent the evening looking over her shoulder to the place where the bomb had eventually gone off.
A former neighbour of the suicide bomber believes he could have been a member of the terror group for quite some time. Antone Jones, who lived close to the attacker in the Fallowfield area of the city, described seeing the ISIS flag being draped from the roof of his house.
Another neighbour, from Gorton, said his manner led him to believe he was a member of ISIS.
Meanwhile the person who made the bomb that blew up Manchester Arena is still at large and could strike again at any time. Intelligence services believe that Abedi who had detonated the nail bomb in the foyer of the venue, was a “mule” and that the device had been made by an expert, a Manchester daily reported.
The bomb was a major technical advancement from the crude but lethal attacks using vehicles at Westminster this year and in atrocities in Nice and Berlin in 2016 using trucks. The nail bomb had been packed with nuts and bolts to cause maximum injury in a confined space.
There are fears that whoever made the Manchester Arena bomb, could carry out other similar attacks. On Tuesday night Prime Minister Theresa May increased the UK terror threat level from severe to critical.
A police source told the Manchester Evening New, MEN: “They don’t waste bomb makers. The reason we have gone to critical is because he is still out there and the fear is that he will strike again before they get caught.”
Abedi apparently wasn’t the only member of his family to harbor extremist views, despite having being part of “pro-Western” forces in Libya. Libyan officials arrested the suicide bomber’s father and two brothers and uncovered what investigators called a plot for a new attack.
Hashim Ramadan Abedi has confessed both he and his brother were a part of the Islamic State group and that Hashim had been aware of the details of the attack. Hashim Abedi, who was born in 1997, was arrested in Tripoli on Wednesday evening, a government spokesman told Reuters on Wednesday.
The father of the bomber was arrested in Tripoli on Wednesday, a Libyan security spokesman confirmed to The Associated Press. The father, Ramadan Abedi, had said another brother of the bomber, Ismail, was arrested Tuesday.
Earlier, Abdel-Basit Haroun, a former security official in Libya, told The Associated Press that he personally knew Ramadan Abedi and that the elder Abedi was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. In the 2011 allied invasion, members claim to have played a key role in deposing Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s rule. The force has allied itself with the National Transitional Council.
The mother was described in an article by The Guardian as a “very nice woman” who taught a friend’s daughter to read the Quran.
The father had escaped Tripoli in 1993 after Qaddafi’s security authorities issued an arrest warrant and eventually sought political asylum in Britain. The elder Abedi first immigrated to London before settling in the Whalley Range area of south Manchester, where they had lived for at least a decade.
Manchester’s police chief Ian Hopkins told reporters on Wednesday that it is clear “this is a network we are investigating” as he gave an update on the probe into the bomb attack.
Following the March 2017 Westminster terrorist attack, YouGov ran a survey that showed nine in ten British citizens think further terror attacks are likely. Some 70 percent of British citizens thought that the terror threat was worsening.
Statista showed that 90 percent of Brits are expected more terror attacks to hit their country. In the March YouGov poll, most Brits also believed the government was doing a “fairly effective” job handling the threat of terror, but that might change.
Terror attacks in Europe are now almost a daily occurrence, and Europeans are becoming conditioned to accept this fact, because thanks to mainstream propaganda, tolerance trumps safety.
At a vigil in Birmingham, a 39-year-old man has been arrested armed with the two weapons, an axe and a large stick. Around a thousand well-wishers gathered in Victoria Square were told to leave immediately.
“The man was carrying a bag, and as a precaution, Victoria Square where the vigil was being held was cleared for around 15 minutes. A small axe was recovered along with a large stick,” police said.
