Manchester bomber, Salman Abedi, and his father traveled to Libya in 2011 to fight against the Gaddafi government with the approval of the British security establishment.
British Prime Minister Theresa May was at that time Interior Minister with direct responsibility for MI5 and the rest of the UK’s internal security apparatus. Abedi’s father, who has since been arrested along with a younger son in connection with the attack, was one of a large group of Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) members who had been allowed to settle in the UK.
Britain’s MI5 assisted members of the LIFG to travel to Libya to join the fight against Gaddafi. In addition, the young Abedi also went to fight in Syria, a conflict in which Britain sides with the jihadists fighting against Assad’s government. Indeed, it seems that young Abedi was such a clearly dangerous individual that he was reported by members of the Libyan exile community to the authorities at least five times as an obvious extremist threat.
An article on the Middle East Eye news site states that:
The British government operated an “open door” policy that allowed Libyan exiles and British-Libyan citizens to join the 2011 uprising that toppled Muammar Gaddafi even though some had been subject to counter-terrorism control orders.
The article is topped by a picture of a mural in Tripoli, Libya that praises the Manchester Fighters in both English and Arabic.
The UK Telegraph informs us that several members of the LIFG lived near Abedi in Manchester:
Among them was Abd al-Baset Azzouz, a father-of-four from Manchester, who left Britain to run a terrorist network in Libya overseen by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s successor as leader of al-Qaeda.
The Telegraph also noted that Azzouz was an expert bomb-maker.
The UK and US has a history of “stocking up” on these extremist types to be later used against governments that they wish to regime change. Such people are welcomed as asylum seekers while worthy refugees, like Christians fleeing Iraq and Syria, are often denied.
As pointed out in an article by Neil Clark, The UK Telegraph had praised Libya in 2010 as one of the top six cruise destinations but today Libya is acknowledged as being a Daesh stronghold. Seifeddine Rezgui trained at a Daesh base in Libya for his attack in Kantaoui, Tunisia in June 2015 that killed 38 tourists, 30 of them British. Recent attacks in France have also involved persons who had traveled to Libya and Syria, with the authorities turning a blind eye, perhaps because these known extremists were considered useful in achieving their government’s regime change objectives.
Common sense would suggest that if the UK knowingly harbors people who commit atrocities in the Middle East it is likely that some of those people will also commit atrocities against British targets. While the authorities declare their shock and outrage at the attack, British citizens should be asking themselves if this was not an inevitable side effect of elements of their government playing with jihadi fire that resulted in UK citizens getting burned.
In a country that prides itself on having the Mother of Parliaments, it will be interesting to see if voters exercise their democratic right and duty to punish errant politicians by rejecting them at the polls. Prime Minister May’s role in creating and coddling the jihadi Frankenstein that resulted in the Manchester tragedy may well prove to be her downfall. On the other hand, voters may choose to ignore her bad judgment; in which case it is likely that the current dangerously irresponsible policy will continue, with predictably tragic results .
Source: the Dissident website.