No Alarms and No Surprises. Please
May 22nd 2017, 22.31 (BST)
On Monday, May 22nd 2017, Salman Abedi walked into the City Room foyer at the Manchester Arena at Hunts Bank in Central Manchester and detonated an explosive suicide device. Within seconds, the innocent giddy replay of post-concert highlights as the kids typed-in messages and added captions and filters to ‘snaps’ about the concert collapsed beneath the roar of forty pounds of shrapnel ripping through the building. The attack claimed the lives of 22 people including seven children. By July 2017, over 14 people had been arrested in connection with the incident.
At the time of the event, Britain’s press and security services reacted with the usual surprise, but the warnings had been substantial. I was just one of scores of people left deeply disturbed by the tragedy. It had a personal resonance too, as I knew one of the teachers who had taught Nell Jones, the 14-year-old Holmes Chapel schoolgirl killed in the explosion. Another of his students, Freya Lewis, was left with life-changing injuries. It was brought even closer to home by the fact that I had daughters the same age as several of those killed in the attack. I, like, everybody else, wanted to know what happened. I didn’t want to wait around five years for an inquiry to begin and finish, and I didn’t want to be told lies. I wanted something that I could trust. Something I could be sure of. It was just too overwhelming not to.
My reasons for doing this weren’t political, and contrary to what you might think, I have every sympathy for the problems faced by our security services and the severe strain they are under due to high counter-terrorism caseloads, overly stretched resources and a shortage of government funding. The reasons are a lot more personal than that; they come from a deep-rooted sense of betrayal, and a fear of being deceived. I grew up in a pretty dysfunctional family environment, marked by regular periods of hysteria and paranoia. To put it simply, my parents argued a lot. Standing around the dining table, claims and accusations would fly like bullets. The trick wasn’t in dodging them exactly but in picking them out of the air and examining each one very carefully. And after examining them, sort them into those that were fired justifiably — sometimes in self-defence — and those that were meant to cause the most chronic and senseless injury. Attempts to make sense of it all, and find anything that resembled the truth was often blocked by layer upon layer of bullshit. I mean; who were you meant to believe in a situation like this? Knowing who or what to believe was like getting the formula right for some difficult maths equation. Without the right formula, the results might look right, but they weren’t right. Making the right choice always seemed critical to moving forward and backing the right cause — making sure that all the things you believed in wouldn’t be pulled from beneath your feet at a later date. It was all about not allowing oneself to be deceived. It’s like that song, right? ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again?’ I guess I’m still sorting those invisible bullets.
Most of the reports emerging in the press about Salman Abedi were full of contradictions, and in the absence of reliable information all those wacky conspiracy theories started moving in. So over the next few weeks and months I applied a lot of time and energy to finding out the truth. I spoke with Chris Osuh of the Manchester Evening News, and he too seemed to think that there was a more complex knot to unpick. After exchanging several emails with Alastair Sloan of The Guardian, I soon realised that there were indeed many journalists who thought we weren’t getting a clear picture of the circumstances leading up to the tragedy. So much of what happened could have been anticipated as far back as 2006 when the United Nations had been forced to draw up a formal terror list featuring several individuals associated with Manchester’s Libyan Islamic Fighting Group — the group who led the ground assault in Libya during a multi-national bid by Britain, France and America to remove Muammar Gaddafi from power in 2011. If you need something to hang it on, you can call it citizen journalism, participatory journalism or grassroots media. But whatever you want to call it, it’s all been done without the usual filters and prejudices in place. And the truth is truly terrifying.
What you get in the PDF document below is a deep-dive into the multi-decade political, financial, and foreign policy developments surrounding the May 22, 2017, Manchester Arena attack (2017-22). In the report, I have set out to identify and examine how shifting Western foreign policy toward Libya—specifically relationships with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and the subsequent realignment toward General Khalifa Haftar’s forces in Tobruk—intersected with the radicalization of bomber Salman Abedi and his network. Here’s what we’ll be looking at:
- The LIFG Policy Reversals: The report charts the trajectory of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group from a proscribed terrorist entity to an ally during the 2011 NATO-backed overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, noting the lifting of British control orders and returning of passports to Manchester-based LIFG members.
- The Commercial & Geopolitical Factor: The analysis traces how UK, US, and regional commercial interests—primarily oil access (via Petrofac and Crescent Petroleum) and construction projects—influenced parliamentary lobbying, specifically through the Conservative Middle East Council (CMEC).
- The 2016–2017 Strategic Shift: The report highlights a deliberate pivot by British foreign policy figures and lobbying groups toward General Khalifa Haftar’s Tobruk-based House of Representatives (HoR) over the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli, which was supported by the Abedi family’s networks.
- The Local-Global Network Link: The report maps local relationships in Manchester (Fallowfield, Whalley Range, Didsbury Mosque) to international actors in Tripoli, Benghazi, Istanbul, and the Middle East, linking historical counter-terrorism investigations (such as 2009’s Operation Pathway) to the 2017 Arena bombing.
PDF Download
170 page PDF booklet:
Update September 2026
Earlier this year we saw the murder of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the 53-year-old son of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, at his home in Zintan, Libya. Just hours before his death, Al Jazeera revealed that an email sent to US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2011 revealed plans to access Gaddafi’s frozen assets. Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, had been central to those plans. Pretty soon I got to thinking about King & Spalding, the law firm who were brought in to unlock these billions in assets, and the sex trafficker, Ghislaine Maxwell who was sent to Libya to woo Saif Gaddafi that same year. A senior partner in that law firm was Christopher Wray who immediately upon arrival in office, President Donald Trump put in charge of the FBI, and who was recently accused of stalling the investigation into Epstein (and yes, Trump was already in talks with Gaddafi about building a Libyan super resort). 2027 will be the 10th anniversary of the Manchester Arena Bombing and I have every intention of updating the report above.