Phil Miller introduces a film probing the role of British foreign policy in contributing to the atrocity.
Still from Declassified UK documentary “Blowback: The Road to Manchester.”
By Phil Miller
Declassified UK
The father of the youngest person to be killed in the Manchester Arena attack believes the government and MI5, the domestic military intelligence service, “have blood on their hands” for failing to prevent the suicide bombing.
Salman Abedi, a British man of Libyan heritage, murdered 22 people at a pop concert in May 2017. The Islamic State terrorist group claimed responsibility.
Andrew Roussos, whose 8-year-old daughter Saffie-Rose died in the atrocity, says counter-terrorism police “should be embarrassed of themselves” over their monitoring of Abedi and his family.
Roussos also accuses the British authorities of “using them for their own gain” in a reference to how the Abedi family fought on the same side as NATO forces during the uprising against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
He made the remarks in an interview for the documentary, Blowback: The Road to Manchester.
Bereaved father Andrew Roussos. (Phil Miller/DCUK)
Unlike other documentaries about the Manchester Arena attack, which tend to focus on failures by the emergency services in the hours before and after the bombing, Blowback examines the longer-term political causes of the tragedy.
Produced by myself and presented by Mark Curtis, the author of Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion With Radical Islam, the film traces the links between the bomber’s family and U.K. foreign policy towards Libya.
We investigate the claim made days after the attack by the Labour Party’s then leader, Jeremy Corbyn, that there were connections between terrorism at home and wars Britain had fought abroad – something that at the time was deemed controversial.
Watch Blowback: The Road to Manchester online now by joining Declassified UK
The U.K. Home Office allowed a wave of Libyan dissidents to settle in Manchester in the aftermath of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, which the West blamed on Gaddafi’s regime.
Among these exiles was Salman Abedi’s father, Ramadan, who arrived in the city in 1993 having fought in Afghanistan on the same side as Osama Bin Laden.
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, LIFG
Ramadan Abedi was a supporter of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a militant organisation associated with Al Qaeda.
Kenny MacAskill MP, who handled the Lockerbie file when he was Scotland’s justice secretary, tells the film, “Britain wasn’t acting against them because the focus was Gaddafi.”
Blowback explores the complex relationship between the LIFG and British intelligence, who initially supported the group in a plot to kill Gaddafi. After 9/11, MI6 switched sides and handed over the LIFG’s leadership to be tortured in Libya, as part of former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s “deal in the desert.”
The Arab Spring saw another dramatic policy shift, when former Prime Minister David Cameron allied with LIFG remnants to overthrow Gaddafi in 2011.
A lawyer for the Roussos family, Pete Weatherby QC, says Cameron’s government had “an incredibly stupid and naïve British colonial approach to my enemy’s enemy is my friend. So they completely blank out who they are backing.”
Among the LIFG veterans fighting alongside NATO was Ramadan Abedi, accompanied by his three teenage sons Ismail, Salman and Hashem.
Weatherby, who works at barristers’ chambers Garden Court North in Manchester, believes Salman Abedi “was radicalised by the people he was almost certainly knocking around with” in the 2011 conflict. “There was the experience of extreme violence and all that comes with it, death and injury,” he said.
The RAF gave air cover for Islamist militias, led by LIFG veterans, to take over Libya’s capital Tripoli. Hillary Clinton’s U.S. State Department then paid a militia linked to the Abedis, the February 17th Martyrs Brigade, to protect U.S. diplomats in post-war Libya.
Blowback
Islamists failed to win a majority at elections that were held in Libya after Gaddafi’s death. However, they refused to disarm their militias, sending the country into another round of civil war. The chaos provided fertile ground for Al Qaeda and the Islamic State terrorist group.
The Abedi family continued travelling between Britain and Libya during this civil war. The Royal Navy evacuated Salman and Hashem from Tripoli in 2014. Once back in Manchester, MI5 overlooked the Abedi brothers’ increasing links to IS.
Commenting on British policy towards young men going to fight in Libya, Andrew Roussos tells us: “I don’t understand the reasons why, when you do bring them back to this country and you do know what these people are involved in, not to have a close eye on them. That’s what I can’t swallow.”
Curtis traces the bomber’s movements in the years leading up to the attack. He navigates viewers through a wall of silence from MI5, the Home Office and even, at times, the official inquiry, to show how many opportunities there were to prevent the massacre.
MacAskill, who oversaw the U.K.’s second largest police force, draws a disturbing parallel between British state collusion with terrorist groups in Northern Ireland and their haphazard handling of the Abedi family. He comments: “The fact that Libyans would be allowed to come and go, some would be let in and out. None of that surprises me.”
The film, released last month, comes at a volatile time in Libya, where in early July protesters torched a parliament building. The country is split between two prime ministers.
One of them, Fathi Bashagha, recently told the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee: “More than a decade after the revolution that got rid of the Gaddafi regime…we are still in chaos.”
Bashagha claimed that his British-backed rival, Abdul Hamid al-Dbeibeh, is “sitting in Tripoli protected by a limited number of militias, some of which are believed to be linked to international terrorist groups.”
Read Declassified UK’s investigations into the Manchester bombing here.
Phil Miller is Declassified UK’s chief reporter. He is the author of Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away With War Crimes. Follow him on Twitter at @pmillerinfo
This article is from Declassified UK.
I sympathize with all victims, be it, Roussou family and all others who died in the attack and the millions killed and/or displaced by NATO. All are victims including the fools who get played by NATO to act on their behalf for some worldly gain. Colonial powers have gotten more sophisticated in their ways to satisfy their greed. The people in these countries who vote for these greedy leeches to stay in power also share the blame since they keep the system alive.
So true, the innocent everywhere must be protected. The publics be they within Britain or without should not be blamed because the MSM and even the “fact-checked” social media are so competent at brain-washing the unsuspecting masses everywhere. The power of the evil elites are enormous, imagine they can even ruin the generally peaceful Muslim peoples and the image of truely peaceful Islam by even coopting power-greedy IslamIST and “Islamist” the world over to advance their globalist agenda both within Britain and abroad ! Britain and its ex-colonial lapdogs across the world are equally guilty of this and many other similar atrocities !
Shouldn’t Obama be doing life without parole for his crimes against humanity in Libya?
How has he been so thoroughly let off the hook? Geeze his name doesn’t even appear in this article.
Obama is a murderous soulless butcher who gleefully embraces the burning of women and children alive to please billionaires.
Is there a more evil person walking the planet?
I would say the hand of MI5 is to ENSURE/CHAPERONE the event happening. The Kabuki ever continues.
How about some blowback for Russia, you red commie Stalinists?
Any normal person immediately, intuitively, sees the connection that Jeremy Corbin made and was vilified for ‘between terrorism at home and wars fought abroad’.
The enormous disrespect our intelligence agencies and “elected” (with the help of fear mongering propaganda) leaders have for us and for the brown and black and multicolored peoples of the world whose homes we covet for their natural resources is horrific (to borrow from Joseph Conrad’s last words in ‘Heart of Darkness’).
We elect criminals who squander the peoples’ money to generate dirty profits for powerful insiders. Why else the wars?
People like Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, are too corrupt and too dumb to recognize why elected officials – the insiders who make the policies and the financial news and cash in on it – should be barred from financial trading that makes windfalls off the expenditure of public funds. When challenged she proclaimed – “this is a capitalist country isn’t it?”
She lacks the integrity and logic to understand this or chooses to ignore it, corrupted long ago…
Criminal Enterprises such as this are indeed responsible for the deaths of the innocent victims like Andrew Roussos’ child and the suffering of those left behind.
White Supremacist western governments believe they should control the rest of the world while they are so incompetent that they are currently in the process of ruining their own countries not to mention putting us all under the threat of Nuclear War and Climate Disruption.
Our voters need to recognize that we must do better. Kick the bums out. And choose responsible leadership.
Getting along in a multipolar world is the sane and responsible thing to do. The Blairs, the Clintons, the Mays, the Camerons, don’t serve us, they serve the warmongers and the profiteers.