Hashem Abedi, the terrorist who killed 22 people at a bombing in Manchester, UK in 2017 took part in a protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to London in September two years prior before the attack, the Daily Mail reports on Friday.
According to the newspaper, Abedi was part of a group that had traveled from Manchester to attend the Downing Street demonstration before moving to another protest outside the United Arab Emirates embassy.
The newspaper claimed that the second protest was organized by a British group that supported a Libyan militia group associated with Al-Qaeda’s Ansar al-Sharia.
The September 2015 protest was organized by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), an activist organisation backed by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn that supports the Palestinian people and calls for a withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank. There is no evidence that Abedi has any formal links to the PSC or to Jeremy Corbyn.
Two years after he joined the protest, Abedi detonated explosives in a crowd of mostly youngsters exiting an Ariana Grande concert in the Manchester Arena.
A public inquiry in September heard that Abedi was linked to six MI5 “subjects of interest” and had visited an incarcerated terrorist twice before carrying out the attack.
According to a report in the Guardian, Abedi had become a “subject of interest" himself but his file was closed in July 2014 - a year before he took part in the anti-Netanyahu protest and three years prior to the Manchester terrorist incident.
Abedi had been part of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), which is described by the British government as an official terrorist organisation seeking to establish a "hardline Islamic state" in Libya and "is part of the wider global Islamist extremist movement, as inspired by al-Qaeda".
As part of a wider policy of removing the Mu'ammar Gaddafi government in Tripoli, then Home Secretary Theresa May permitted LIFG jihadists to travel across Europe.
*al-Qaeda is a terrorist group banned in Russia