Nation/World

‘Forgive me’: The tangled path to the bombing in Manchester

MANCHESTER, England — Salman Abedi was wearing a red vest, his suicide bomb hidden in a small backpack, when he phoned his younger brother in Libya and asked him to put his mother on the line. It was about 10:20 p.m. on Monday, and the call was short.

"How are you doing, Mom? Please forgive me for anything I did wrong," he said, and hung up.

A short time later, he walked through the glass doors of the Manchester Arena, the city's biggest concert venue, lingered for a few minutes by the stalls selling merchandise related to Ariana Grande, the American singer who was performing there that night, and blew himself up, killing 22 people and wounding 116.

Since the attack, police have taken 11 people into custody, and on Saturday Britain lowered its threat level from "critical" to "severe." Officials are confident that they have captured the entire network. But the investigation continues into the network's hierarchy, the precise logistics involved in planning the bombing, and what motivated Abedi.

The brief phone call to his mother — "forgive me for anything I did wrong" — encapsulated a deeply complicated family tale of conflict and rebellion, a complex interweaving of personal histories and the tortured recent history of Libya.

It is the story of a strict father's flight from the repression of Moammar Gadhafi, Libya's leader at the time, and a personal jihad against that dictatorship, which in turn shook up his children's world.

The seismic tremors from Libya's revolution in 2011 reverberated across geographical and generational borders, in Manchester's sizable Libyan population — the largest outside Libya — and in the Abedi family as well. Almost certainly, the events that helped set Salman Abedi on his hauntingly familiar path, from quiet boy in a strict Islamic household to troubled young man to, eventually, suicide bomber, began there.

ADVERTISEMENT

As Gadhafi tottered in 2011, Abedi's father, Ramadan, returned to Libya to finish the fight he had started two decades earlier, and took his British-born teenage sons with him. The elder Abedi, a onetime Gadhafi enforcer, fled Libya in 1991 after supporting Islamists seeking to overthrow the brutal leader. Now, as Western warplanes pummeled Tripoli, the capital, that dream was finally coming true.

His sons — Ismail, Salman and Hashem — accompanied Abedi to Tunisia, where he worked on logistics for the rebels in western Libya. The sons knew very little about Libya, having grown up in the Whalley Range, a working-class area of Manchester. But their father, a proud Islamist, wanted them to follow in his footsteps at this euphoric moment.

Salman, a lanky 16-year-old at the time, joined his father as the Tripoli Revolutionary Brigade descended on the Libyan capital that summer. A year later, Ramadan snapped a photograph of 15-year-old Hashem holding a machine gun.

"Hashem the lion … training," read the caption on the father's Facebook page.

They were not the only ones to make the journey from Britain. Akram Ramadan, who fought alongside Ramadan Abedi, recalled there being a strong contingent known as "the Manchester fighters."

"We were all fighting," Akram Ramadan said in Manchester. "Drug dealers from here were fighting — everybody went."

After gaining a taste of battle, Salman was sent back to Manchester, while his father decided to stay.

There is no way to prove that this experience in Libya put Salman on the path that led him to the doors of the Manchester Arena. But the experience of armed struggle in one generation can beget violence in the next, terrorism experts say, even with an entirely different ideological underpinning.

"The older generation normalizes militancy," said Raffaello Pantucci, a specialist in researching terrorism at the Royal United Services Institute. "Which direction it goes depends on the time. And the kids rebel against their parents."

And rebel Salman certainly did. According to accounts by family friends and neighbors, his strict Muslim upbringing was upended by the events of 2011.

He had been a quiet boy who was teased, and sometimes bullied, at school, a former classmate recalled. A fan of Manchester United, he developed a passion and aptitude for soccer.

"He was polite, just a normal teenager," said one neighbor, who remembers him as a boy.

'They Can Get Lost'

But that changed with the fall of Gadhafi. While Salman's father stayed in Libya, he lived with his mother and siblings in Manchester, where he began to drink alcohol and smoke marijuana. Some said he fell in with local gangs. He became known for a temper and a readiness to fight.

Akram Ramadan said the absence of a father figure was often a problem for Libyan families, particularly the Abedi sons, whose father imposed strict discipline.

"There was a lot of it here, putting pressure on their kids to become very, very, over the top, good Muslim kids," Ramadan said.

"When the revolution kicked off and all these dads went to Libya to fight, the kids found freedom," Ramadan said, adding that Salman's mother, Samia, was unable to control him.

ADVERTISEMENT

Salah Rashid, 69, the mother's accountant, concurred. "I've seen many residents leave for Libya," he said. "If they don't embrace their children and teenagers, they can get lost."

In Libya in the days immediately after the bombing, the father was arrested by a militia, the Special Deterrence Forces, which said it had also detained Salman's younger brother, Hashem, now 20. It was a spokesman for the militia who provided the details about Salman's phone call to his family before the bombing.

His father divided his time between Manchester, where he led prayers at a local mosque, and Tripoli, where he worked as an administrator in the Interior Ministry. As other Arab countries plunged into conflict, he cheered on like-minded Islamists like the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front in Syria.

In Manchester, the Abedi family were well known at Didsbury Mosque, a long-standing establishment popular with Manchester's large Libyan population and the diaspora from other Arab countries. Ramadan Abedi, who had studied the Quran in Saudi Arabia, often did the call to prayer.

Known by the honorific Abu Ismael, he had a "particularly beautiful voice," congregants recalled. Salman's older brother, Ismail, helped out at the mosque with IT support and some teaching. He was arrested in Britain in the days after the bombing.

Salman was a more solitary figure. "He barely even attended Eid prayers," said Mohammed Fadil, 25, who knows Salman's older brother. "He kept away from the community. When prayer finishes, you stay behind, you chat. With him it was different."

When he did come, it was usually with his father, Fadil said, "but after his father had moved back to Libya, there was no reason for him to come anymore." And with his father gone, Salman was showing signs of following a different path.

The last time Salman was noticed at the mosque was during a Friday prayer session in 2015 when the imam gave a sermon that was critical of the Islamic State. Salman angrily objected. It was around this time that at least two members of the congregation reported him on a counterterrorism hotline for expressing extremist views.

ADVERTISEMENT

But as older Libyans spent their time discussing politics in their homeland, some younger ones, like Abedi, found an ideology elsewhere — one that by now had supporters in both Britain and Libya.

Salman Abedi and other family members visited their father in Libya regularly. By 2015, the Islamic State had established a base in the city of Sirte, and had hidden pockets of support in cities like Tripoli, where the Abedi family is from.

It was there, according to officials from Libya and the United States, that Salman established a connection with Abdul Baset Ghwela, a radical preacher whose son had died fighting in the eastern city of Benghazi.

Back in Manchester, he is believed to have had links with other young residents of the city who joined the Islamic State in recent years, security officials said. One of them is Raphael Hostey, a prolific recruiter for ISIS who is believed to have been killed in a drone strike in Syria in May last year, age 24.

Despite denials from Hostey's brother, Junade, officials believe that Abedi and Hostey knew each other before Hostey left for Syria in 2013. "He was his hero," one law enforcement official said of Abedi's admiration for Hostey.

The killing of Hostey was the start of a fateful two weeks that may have further steeled Abedi's urge for revenge.

A week later, another acquaintance, Abdalraouf Abdallah, 24, was jailed for nine years after being convicted of funding terrorism and preparing acts of terrorism. The very next day, Abdul Wahab Hafidah — a friend of Salman and a close friend of his younger brother — was run over and then stabbed to death in Manchester, in what police called a gang-related episode.

The killing was a "wake-up call" for Libyan parents about their children's involvement with gangs, said Ahmed Sewehli, a psychiatrist. "It was a big deal in the Libyan community."

'He Was Always Alone'

Around this time, Salman is believed to have started planning Monday's attack. He opened a bank account, which would go unused until he used it to buy supplies for his suicide bomb from two hardware stores nearly a year later. The money in the account came from student loans, officials confirmed Saturday — loans that he continued to receive even after dropping out of Salford University, where he enrolled in 2015 to study business management.

He made little mark at the university. One fellow student said he had come to just a handful of lectures before disappearing.

"I saw him in the prayer room sometimes," said Abdul Omar, 22, a second-year student who presides over the university's Islamic Society. "I remember seeing him waiting a bit earlier for the prayer. He was always alone."

ADVERTISEMENT

In recent months Abedi had been worshipping at the Salaam Community and Masjid in the Moss Side area of Manchester. But here, too, things did not go smoothly.

Though typically quiet and withdrawn, he was reprimanded twice, once for lingering after dawn prayers when he was supposed to have left the building. When admonished by Abdullah Muhsin Norris, chairman of the board of trustees at the mosque, he reacted badly, saying he didn't want to be shouted at, only to be told in response that he was "acting like a child."

On a separate occasion, Abedi objected when a beardless Libyan member of the congregation was about to lead prayers. "He walked out," said Norris, who added that he had not seen Abedi since he reprimanded him and that, had it not been for those two incidents, he would not have noticed him.

Tensions were growing within the Abedi family. Alarmed at the direction his son was taking, Salman's father forced him to come to Libya this spring and briefly confiscated his passport.

When Akram Ramadan, the family friend, last met Abedi less than three months ago, he initially failed to recognize the young man, who was leaning on a car outside his brother's home, waiting to pick him up for prayers in a long, beige-colored, Islamic shirt.

But Abedi recognized his father's friend and greeted him with the Arabic term for "uncle."

ADVERTISEMENT

"I hope you are not doing any naughty tricks or pranks anymore," said Akram Ramadan, referring to Abedi's past reputation.

"No, no, no," Abedi had answered. "I quit doing pranks."

ADVERTISEMENT