INDEX
Tuesday July 24, 2018
What happens to the real terrorists while the 'intelligence' services chase trade unionists and political activists Case Study: Salman Abedi
The UK 'intelligence' services scheduled a meeting to discuss the threat posed by Salman Abedi nine days after he exploded a device that killed 22 people at Manchester Arena, according to an official report by David Anderson QC. He concluded the bombing could have been averted.
Anderson's report reveals a catalogue of errors. Salman Abedi, a Manchester born 22-year-old, was first classfied as a "subject of interest" in 2014. But it turned out that Abedi, whose parents had fled Libya, had been mistaken for someone else. Then in 2015 'intelligence' linked Abedi to an Islamic State figure in Libya. This also turned out to be rubbish.
Abedi's name continued to pop up in a number of investigations, so the 'intelligence' services scheduled a meeting to discuss his case, and a number of others, on May 31, 2017. The bombing happened on May 22.
A mosque Abedi attended was alleged to have had a hate preacher who was advocating Jihad in a sermon delivered just six months prior to the Manchester outrage. See BBC report.
Abedi and his three siblings were brought up in a 1960s terraced house in Elsmore Road on Manchester's Fallowfield estate. A neighbour told the Manchester Evening News that in 2015 there was a black flag or banner on the roof, with Arabic writing on it. The Taliban, al-Qaeda and ISIS have all used the black flag and the video in which ISIS claimed responsibility for the Manchester bombing featured a black flag.
Prior to the bombing most of his family had gone to stay in Libya, though one brother had married and moved away. Abedi was living alone and three events in eight days seem to have triggered his determination to become a suicide bomber.
Abdalraouf Abdallah, a friend, was jailed for terror offences in London. Then Abdul Hafidah, another friend, died of stab wounds in a gang related incident in Moss Side. Finally, Raphael Hostey, an acquiantance who was serving with ISIS, died in a drone strike in Syria.
He seems to have made the bomb himself, shopping for ingredients and discovering how to do it, online. Clearly if GCHQ's Tempora system, designed to extract all phone and internet traffic, had been tracking terrorists instead of trade unionists and political activists, Abedi would have been stopped long before he got to the Manchester Arena.
Preparing for the attack Abedi wore a baseball cap under a hood, when he bought a rucksack at Manchester's Arndale Centre. The rucksack was to carry an improvised bomb: explosives tightly packed with nuts and bolts and a battery.
On the night of May 22, 2017, as American singer Ariana Grande performed her Manchester Arena show, Salman Abedi phoned his mother in Libya and said: 'forgive me for anything I have done wrong'.
Abedi waited in the City Room lobby of the arena, for the area to fill up. At 10.31pm, when he was sure he could cause maximum carnage, he triggered the detonator.
This blog is based on reports in various online newspapers: The Daily Telegraph https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/05/mi5-had-planned-discuss-manchester-bomber-suspicions-just-nine/. The Manchester Evening News https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/salman-abedi-manchester-arena-bomber-13601393	Posted by Jonathan Brind.
Additional July 2022: For a while there have been a number of stories about the long term involvement of the British state with the family of Salman Abedi. This story by Peter Oborne goes into some detail about this. However, Oborne is a former Telegraph journalist and at least at one time, MI6 seems to have regarded the Telegraph as its house journal (according to Annie Machon's book Spies, Lies & Whistleblowers ). MI6 and MI5 are alleged to be in a more or less permanent state of conflict...
INDEX
Tuesday July 24, 2018