Saturday, March 21, 2020

SALMAN AND HASHEM ABEDI: THE BROTHERS WHO BOMBED MANCHESTER

Salman and Hashem Abedi



Like so many children growing up in Manchester, the Abedi brothers spent the long summer evenings out on their street kicking a football around.

There was not much that marked them out as they played with the other kids on Elsmore Road in Fallowfield - a red-brick residential suburb of south Manchester.

There were other Libyans in the neighborhood, many more had settled across Manchester - building their lives, contributing to the community and enjoying life as Mancunians...

Hashem Abedi conspired with his brother to carry out the attack

So how did Salman and Hashem Abedi come to attack the city they'd grown up in by bombing an Ariana Grande concert in 2017? The trial of Hashem Abedi has given us many of the details but still not the whole picture.



He has now been convicted but he wasn't even in the UK when his brother Salman detonated the suicide bomb that killed 22 others in the foyer of the Manchester Arena.


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Despite his denials to the police, the jury was told that the younger surviving brother was "just as guilty" as his older brother who detonated the bomb. It was an elaborate, calculated and drawn out plot that started in their backyard shed behind the family home on Elsmore Road.


Their parents had chosen to move back to Libya in 2016 and the brothers were left to get on with their lives in Manchester.

Hashem Abedi's DNA was found at the flat where the bomb was made

They weren't particularly academic and had started hanging around with mates drifting into petty crime. We do not know precisely who inspired or persuaded them to make the bomb in the name of Islamic State terrorism but friends had noticed a change in them, particularly Salman.

Hashem worked in a takeaway restaurant and started asking the owner if he could take the metal vegetable oil cans away for scrap.

The cans weren't really worth much more than a few pence but Hashem and Salman started using them to test homemade explosives they were experimenting with at their property on Elsmore Road.

A piece from one of the cans was later found at the scene of the bombing at the arena.

The cans had been cut and modified and turned into prototype containers for an explosive device - the brothers spent months refining their method and right up until a few days before the bombing Salman was still searching hardware stores in Manchester for the right container for their bomb.

Prosecutors said Hashem Abedi was 'just as guilty' as his brother

Between January 2017 and April that year, they also set about gathering together the chemicals needed for the bomb.

They persuaded a series of friends, relatives, and associates to use online accounts to order collectively over 70 liters of either sulphuric acid or hydrogen peroxide.

Their story was that it was for a generator back in Libya and the chemicals couldn't be sourced over there.

The brothers had many of the deliveries sent to an empty terraced house in Rusholme that had been lent to them...

The brothers sub-let a flat where they prepared the bomb

They then sub-let a 12th floor flat in north Manchester where they stored and prepared the bomb. It was an obscure address on the other side of the city - somewhere they were unlikely to see anyone they knew.

Hashem's fingerprints and DNA were found there along with traces of the explosives they were making from the chemicals.

On 13 April they bought a cheap Nissan Micra on Gumtree and told the person selling it they were going to use it for Uber deliveries. Instead, the brothers emptied the contents of the 12th floor flat into the Micra and also hired a taxi to get themselves and their equipment back to south Manchester.

Traces of the explosives were found in the flat

The taxi driver thought it was unusual but simply thought they were moving something "fragile" in the boxes they'd loaded up.

The ingredients for their bomb would remain stored in the Nissan Micra while the Abedi brothers left the country a day or so later. They flew to Libya to see their parents.

Whoever else Salman met or talked to in Libya before his return to the UK, nothing persuaded him to change the path that he and his brother had laid out for themselves in Manchester over the previous three months.

Before he flew back Salman contacted the owner of a flat that was available to rent near Piccadilly station in Manchester. This is the property where he would finally assemble the bomb.

While his younger brother Hashem remained in Libya, Salman landed at Manchester airport on 18 May - he took a taxi straight to the area where the Nissan Micra - the makeshift storage facility - had been parked up for weeks.

He checked on it and then headed into the city to meet the owner of the flat. This is where Salman Abedi finalized his bomb and the plan of where and when to detonate it...

Salman Abedi used a suitcase to move items from the car to a flat

That evening he visited the arena and went shopping for batteries, a large suitcase, bulbs, tape and flexible cable. The next day he used the suitcase to move items from the Nissan Micra to the flat so he could assemble the device.

He then spent the rest of the day buying more items - large money in that would be the container for the bomb, a rucksack for the bomb, parcel tape and 50x100 packs of metal nuts. In total, he bought 5,000 metal nuts that cost him £296.50.

Salman Abedi visited the arena before shopping for materials for his device

Over the following days, he made more shopping trips around Manchester buying a five-liter paint tin and yet more screws and nuts. It would be the shrapnel that would kill and maim so indiscriminately during the explosion at the upcoming concert.

During this time there was a series of calls to unidentified numbers from Salman. If he was taking final instructions from somebody the police and security services have not been able to say who it was. If the security services were watching him, and we had been told that he was on their radar, these repeated shopping trips would surely have triggered alerts.

Salman Abedi bought a five-liter paint tin and more screws and nuts

The night of the attack was 22 May 2017 - a date seared into the memory of the city of Manchester.

The explosive device that he put together in the flat near Piccadilly weighed 36kg. It meant that he stooped under the weight of the backpack that he carried out of the flats and onto the tram that would take him to Manchester Victoria station right next to the arena.

At 8.51pm he entered the foyer but then wandered back towards the metro where he sat down. It appeared he was waiting for the concert to end to maximize the number of people in the foyer.

It was 10.31pm as Ariana Grande was concluding the show when Salman detonated the bomb. His brother was in Libya - but this terrorist attack was a joint enterprise. Hashem's fingerprints and DNA were all over the bomb.

The trial has established that fact, but not the individuals in the shadows who really motivated them to kill.

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