A security guard who had “a bad feeling” about Manchester Arena terror bomber Salman Abedi has admitted that he ignored him because he was “scared” he would be “branded a racist”.
“I felt unsure about what to do,” said Kyle Lawler, who was 18 at the time of radical Islamic terror attack, describing the bomber as “fidgety and sweating”.
“It’s very difficult to define a terrorist. For all I knew he might well be an innocent Asian male,” Lawler explained at a public inquiry investigating the attack.
“I did not want people to think I am stereotyping him because of his race.
“I was scared of being wrong and being branded a racist if I got it wrong and would have got into trouble. It made me hesitant.
“I wanted to get it right and not mess it up by over-reacting or judging someone by their race,” he said.
Ultimately, of course, Lawler did not get it right, with his politically correct sensibilities arguably contributing to the killing and maiming of hundreds of people, mostly children, adolescents, and their parents, with 22 fatalities and over 100 hospitalisations.
The security guard’s apparent misstep is just one of a litany of failures leading up to Abedi’s bombing, which perhaps date all the way back to the decision to allow his Islamist father to claim asylum in Britain in the first place.
These include Britain’s security services reportedly operating an “open door” policy to Libyan-heritage British passport-holders like Abedi entering Libya to join factions fighting against the Gaddafi government, including Islamist organisations, as well as the Royal Navy ‘rescuing’ Abedi from the North African country with a warship and returning him to Britain after helping to plunge it into chaos.
The security services are also reported to have been aware of Abedi visiting a convicted jihadist in prison twice — indeed, he was flagged by the authorities 18 times prior to the Manchester bombing, but they failed to stop him from progressing to planning and executing an attack.
Lawler does not appear to be the only authority figure to have failed on the day of the attack itself, either, with a police officer having been absent from the scene after deciding to take an unauthorised two-hour break from their duties and members of the public concerned by Abedi’s giant rucksack and strange behaviour, which included Islamic prayers, being repeatedly “fobbed off” despite reporting him.
“Yeah, yeah, we’ve seen him, he’s fine,” one witness said they were told, 15 minutes before he exploded.