Salman Abedi was 19 when he boarded the HMS Enterprise in Tripoli
The Manchester suicide bomber responsible for an attack with a home-made bomb in the foyer of the Manchester Arena in 2017 killing 22 people, was rescued by the Royal Navy from the civil war in Libya.
Salman Abedi was 19 when he boarded the HMS Enterprise in Tripoli in August 2014 and his younger brother Hashem.
According to documents, Abedi’s name was on a list of stranded citizens handed to crew members in charge of the evacuation.
The vessel took them to Malta before being flown back to the UK.
According to The Guardian: In May last year, he killed 22 people, including seven children, at an Ariana Grande concert with a homemade suicide vest.
A government spokesman said: “During the deteriorating security situation in Libya in 2014, Border Force officials were deployed to assist with the evacuation of British nationals and their dependants.”
Abedi was being monitored by security services when he travelled to Libya, but his case was closed a month before his rescue.
The Anderson review into the Manchester attack found that the decision to close Abedi’s case as a “subject of interest” was sound, based on the information available to security services at the time.
A government source told the Daily Mail: “For this man to commit such an atrocity on UK soil after we rescued him from Libya was an act of utter betrayal.”
Hashem Abedi is held in prison in Libya by a militia group, but the British government has requested his extradition to face trial for his involvement in the attack.
The request has so far been refused.
According to SkyNews: Libya has been plunged into chaos since the uprising against long-time ruled Muammar Gaddafi, who was killed in 2011.
Since disputed elections in 2014, the country has been split between competing political and military factions in the west and east of the country.
The country has been torn in two. The Tripoli government is rejected by its eastern-based rivals.
Political turmoil and armed conflict have led to economic collapse, allowing migrant smugglers to flourish and giving space to Islamist militants.
By July, the UN had to pull out of Libya, embassies were shut and foreign travellers and tourists had to leave.
Salman Abedi was born in Manchester in 1994 after his parents had fled the Gaddafi regime in Libya.
A Sky News investigation revealed how Abedi spent some years on the same housing estates in south Manchester as a group of young men who radicalised each other, with some fighting for IS in Syria and Iraq.
Abedi and Hostey hung around on the same estates and worshipped in the same Didsbury mosque, before they became disaffected with life in the West.