The brother of a man being questioned as part of the investigation into the Manchester Arena bombing has said it is unlikely that Salman Abedi worked alone.
Dawn raids, multiple arrests, bomb disposal squads and armed patrols have become a regular feature on Manchester’s streets since the attack on Monday 22 May which killed 22 people and left 116 injured.
Now the brother of one of the 14 men who are in custody has said he is sure Abedi did not work alone.
The brother of Zuhair Nassrat, who was taken into custody in a dramatic raid in Gorton on Sunday night, said Abedi had lived with his family for about six weeks in 2011.
The brother, who lives in Chester and asked not to be named, said: “The Libyan community in Manchester don’t believe in any way that he was by himself – he had not got the capability. He [Abedi] does not have it in him, he is not smart enough.”
He said his family knew Abedi as a child and as a teenager, and that his personality had been transformed over the years. The dual British-Libyan national was “nothing like” the person he became.
When Abedi was only 17 and his family left for a visit to Libya, the former Burnage Academy pupil went to stay with the Nassrat family home for about six weeks.
His parents, mother Samia Tabbal and father Ramadan Abedi, a security officer, were Libyan-born refugees who fled to the UK to escape Muammar Gaddafi. They returned to their homeland in 2011.
In that same year, Abedi’s father fought against the Gaddafi regime with the Libyan Islamic fighting group (LIFG) during the Libyan revolution.
The US state department says elements of LIFG were aligned with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida and it designated the group a foreign terrorist organisation in 2004.
“His mother did not want him to be on his own,” said the family friend, a university student in Chester. “In those days he was just a normal teenager, going to the park with us for a drink. He was a big Man Utd fan.”
However, two years ago Abedi – whose brothers, Ismail and Hashem and father, Ramadan, have also been arrested – began to change and distanced himself from Manchester’s Libyan community.
Nassrat’s brother, who condemned the bombing and said Abedi must have been radicalised by something he saw on one of his trips to Libya, said: “He started having animosity towards the whole Libyan community, accusing us of not being Muslims because we drank alcohol. He separated himself off. A lot of us thought it was a phase.
“When I heard he had done the bombing, it was like a stab in the back. England has been amazing to me and my family; we love Manchester.”
He added that he had been told nothing by the authorities about Zuhair’s situation but believed he had now been released.
Zuhair Nassrat was taken into police custody at 7pm on Sunday night. Residents described hearing a loud blast and feeling their houses shake as officers forced their way into the semi-detached property in Gorton.
A resident, who asked to remain anonymous, said a Libyan man who had lived in the house for about a decade had been arrested.
He said: “It was the Libyan lad and they put him in the back of the police van. They did the door with an explosion and then they all went in and we saw them getting him out. I’m not sure what his name is but he’d lived here for a long time.”
Earlier on Sunday, screams and a blast were heard as armed police raided another property elsewhere in Manchester.
Residents reported hearing an explosion near Quantock Close and Selworth Road in the Moss Side area shortly before 2pm on Sunday. Three Libyan brothers were arrested but released without charge.
On the day after the Manchester attack, investigators had concluded that Abedi was no lone actor. They believed he required considerable support in carrying out the attack, which was timed to cause most death and destruction in the moments after pop star Ariana Grande finished her encore.
The first clue was the device itself. Forensic scientific analysts told how it had been crafted with cunning. The shrapnel was evenly spaced to inflict maximum damage and it had a back-up detonation system.
The second clue emerged less than 24 hours after the attack. Intelligence from the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre at MI5 headquarters confirmed there was a risk of a follow-up attack.
Theresa May announced the threat level was being raised to critical, its highest, signalling that another terrorist atrocity was expected imminently. It has now been put back to severe.
Police believed the bombmaker was either still at large or Abedi had distributed more devices to his co-conspirators. The race to trace the terror network had begun.
A week after the attack, this race is still ongoing. There have been 16 arrests so far – the majority in the south Manchester area – with one in Sussex and another in Warwickshire. A total of 14 men, most of them of Libyan descent, remain in custody.
In the latest raid in Whalley Range, the detached home of a Libyan family was searched by police in the early hours of Monday morning. At least six siblings aged from seven to their mid-20s live there with their mother, neighbours said.
A Libyan neighbour, Kada, 22, who lives a few doors down, said she last saw the family at a barbecue on Friday.
“They are a lovely family, really friendly. All the police is doing is targeting Libyans, all Libyans of a similar age because they might have known the bomber – the Libyan community is close-knit,” she said.
Kada said she had been too frightened to leave the house since the bombing. She said she supported the authorities but felt scared that Libyans were being targeted.
“Libyans have lived here for decades,” she said. “As far as I am aware, they have never caused trouble of any kind until now. It’s one person that’s committed this crime. Why should the rest of us be punished for it?”
