The brother of the Manchester Arena bomber faces life in prison after being found guilty on all counts levied against him in connection to the ISIS-style terror attack that killed 22 people.
Hashem Abedi, 22, has been convicted of twenty-two counts of murder, one count of attempted murder and one count of conspiring with his brother, Salman Abedi, to cause an explosion. The terror attack in 2017 targeted young concert-goers at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, leaving 22 dead and hundreds more injured.
Although Hashem Abedi was in Lybia when his brother committed the attack, the court heard that he helped his brother design the bomb and had helped him source chemicals and shrapnel to make the explosive device more deadly.
“That this was a two-man job. These men planned it together and obviously, tragically, it only took one man to blow up the device and kill so many people,” Max Hill, the CPS director of public prosecutions told Sky News.
“The cars that they used, the telephones that they swapped, the places that they lived, the shopping trips that they went on themselves, or asked others, who didn’t know their plans, to go on for them, all of those circumstances built up into an unanswerable case,” Hill added.
The two brothers grew up in Manchester, amongst four other siblings, born to parents who escaped Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s reign in the 1990s. Their father, Ramadan had ties to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a banned terrorist group with links to al-Qaeda.
In the 2011 civil war in Lybia, Ramadan took his sons out of school in England to help assist the rebels fighting against Gaddafi, exposing the brothers to violence and heavy weaponry, according to the BBC.
In 2015, the two Abedi brothers made a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. When they returned Hashem and Salman began espousing radical Islamic jihad ideology, with Salman openly identifying with the violent aims of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS).
Salman was briefly investigated by MI5 before the attack, yet was not considered a threat. However, the future bomber continued to be reported to authorities for his pro-ISIS beliefs and appeared as a contact of other known radical Islamists.
On the evening of the attack, Salman called the Abedi’s family home in Lybia and is believed to have spoken to Hashem before detonating the explosion that killed himself and 22 others. Including the psychological trauma suffered by witnesses, the attack is said to have had “nearly 1000 victims”.
The prosecutor in the case against Hashem Abedi argued that he was just as guilty as his brother for the terrorist attack, saying: “The surviving brother is just as responsible for the crimes which resulted in so much death, serious injury and damage following the detonation of the bomb on the 22 May 2017 as his brother… The defendant through his conduct encouraged and assisted his brother Salman to carry out the attack.”
The two brothers used Amazon accounts of unsuspecting friends to purchase components and chemicals to make the bomb used in the terror attack.
Detectives in the case discovered Hashem’s fingerprints in the car that was used to store explosive material, in the apartment where the bomb was built and on components of the bomb itself.
At the conclusion of the seven-week trial, the jury foreman read out the names of all of the victims of Hashem Abedi, who refused to attend the conclusion of the trial, according to the Manchester Evening News.
The diseased victims of the Manchester Arena attack: Elaine McIver, 43; Saffie-Rose Roussos, eight; Sorrell Leczkowski, 14; Eilidh MacLeod, 14; Nell Jones, 14; Olivia Campbell-Hardy, 15; Megan Hurley, 15; Georgina Callander, 18; Chloe Rutherford,17; Liam Curry, 19; Courtney Boyle, 19; Philip Tron, 32; John Atkinson, 26; Martyn Hett, 29; Kelly Brewster, 32; Angelika Klis, 39; Marcin Klis, 42; Michelle Kiss, 45; Alison Howe, 45; Lisa Lees, 43; Wendy Fawell, 50; and Jane Tweddle, 51.
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