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Journalism of Courage
On Tuesday, the brother of the Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi was found guilty of murdering 22 people during the Manchester Attack of 2017. During the course of his murder trial, Hashem Abedi denied involvement in the attacks and other charges. The youngest victim of the bombing was an eight-year-old girl who was attending the concert with her mother and her sister.
The prosecutors held Hashem Abedi jointly responsible for carrying out the attack along with his brother. The jury accepted the prosecution’s case that Hashem had “assisted” and “encouraged” his brother and knew about his plans to detonate the bomb. At the time of the attack, Hashem was in Libya and was extradited to the UK in July 2019.
In a statement, Max Hill, the Director of Public Prosecutions in the UK said, “Hashem Abedi encouraged and helped his brother knowing that Salman Abedi planned to commit an atrocity. He has blood on his hands even if he didn’t detonate the bomb.”
On the evening of May 22, 2017, Salman Abedi, a 22-year-old British born man of Libyan origin, detonated an explosive in the foyer of the Manchester Arena, where an Ariana Grande concert was going on. The concert was attended by thousands of children. In total, 23 people were killed due to the explosion including Abedi himself. Ten of the victims were aged under 20. The UK police have identified nearly 1000 victims of the attacks, including those that reported suffering from psychological trauma and over more than 200 people who suffered injuries.
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According to an unclassified report prepared by David Anderson, an independent reviewer of terrorism in the UK, at the time of the attack, Salman Abedi was a subject of interest (SOI) but was not under investigation. However, in the months before the attack, MI5 came across intelligence, which if considered significant would have led to opening an investigation on him.
Even so, Anderson notes that it is unknowable if opening such an investigation on him would have prevented the May 22 attack. As per the MI5, the attacks would not have been prevented even with such an investigation. His criminal record with the police was limited to reprimands for theft, receiving stolen goods in 2012 and an assault on a female while in college, for which he was given restorative justice. In 2015, he was opened as an SOI, when he was thought to be a contact of a Daesh figure in Libya, but it was closed on the same day after it was established that the contact was not direct.
Salman Abedi was born in Manchester in 1994 to parents who had been granted asylum in the UK after they fled Gaddafi’s regime in Libya.
