Manchester attacker’s Libya connection

The identity and connections of the culprit who murdered 22 people in a concert area in Manchester are getting more and more clarified
British authorities identified Salman Abedi as the bomber who was responsible for Monday's explosion in Manchester which killed 22 people and injured dozens more.
Thursday, 25 May 2017 06:12

British authorities announced that the suicide bomber Salman Abedi, 22, had visited Libya several times. A friend of Abedi’s explained that Abedi had gone to Libya a few weeks before the assault, and had returned only a few days earlier.

Having been born in Manchester, Abedi, whose family was among those who fled Libya because they were against Gaddafi, grew up in a neighbourhood in Manchester that was populated with anti-Gaddafi Libyans and visited many times a mosque that was suspected of funding jihadists. This mosque is where he was reported to have been “radicalised”. The family, however, had returned to Libya after Gaddafi’s fall. It is also known that Abedi’s father and brother were detained by the Libyan police, and the brother was reported to have known “all the details about the attack plan”.

The important thing is, in Whalley Range, the neighbourhood where Abedi was raised, a group of jihadists are organised and active: Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG).

A member of the LIFG, Salah Aboaoba, was reported to have lived in the neighbourhood in question. In an interview with Channel 4 in 2011, Aboaoba admitted having raised money for the LIFG while he was in town. He stated that he did the fundraising in Didsbury Mosque, which turned out to be where Abedi was reported to have been “radicalised”.

Abedi was only a pawn of a larger network created and fostered by imperialists. The network also contains some of the important, though forgotten, figures of the recent past.

The leader of the Tripoli Brigade that toppled Gaddafi with the support of the NATO was Abdulhakim Belhac, also the leader of the al-Qaeda-related LIFG. The history of the LIFG, however, goes back a longer way.

Another jihadist who was active in Whalley Range was Abdulbasit Azuz. Azuz was accused of the murder of the US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and was arrested with a claimed Turkish-American operation while trying to enter Turkey. But the same man had been taken into custody in England in 2006 and bailed out. Azuz also fought for the CIA-sanctioned jihadist movements against the Soviet Union in late 1980’s and met Osama bin Laden.

It is now known that the British Intelligence Service, MI6, has known about the LIFG since the attempted assassination of Gaddafi in 1996, after which the jihadists arrived in Britain. What is more widely known about the LIFG is that they were supported by the US and England during the “Arab Spring”.

Charles R. Kubic, a veteran, deciphered the day’s US Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Hillary Clinton, in one of his columns in 2016. Kubic was on active duty, a Commodore, during the "Spring", and he stated in his column that two attempts for the truce in Libya had been possible to be successful.

Kubic claims that the first attempt was made by the Department of Defense and the General Staff. The second offered to the US Africa Command, foresaw a direct negotiation of the military commanders so as to secure Gaddafi to lay down his office.

Kubic says that both suggestions were rejected by Minister Clinton. He also reports that Clinton met with Libyan “opponents” in Paris in 2011, among whom there was Mahmoud Jibril, the second man of the Muslim Brothers. Kubic contemplates that Clinton gave a post to the LIFG, which is comprised of the Muslim Brothers and former members of al-Qaeda.

Clinton’s e-mails leaked by Wikileaks, however, display a clearer annotation from her “shadow advisor”, Max Blumenthal. In his mail dated March 30, 2011, Blumenthal clearly states that there were “probably” some of those “who fought us in Iraq” among the protesters in Libya.