A bomb in the foyer as the crowd left
Salman Abedi detonated a nail bomb weighing more than thirty kilograms, packed with TATP explosive and metal shrapnel, in the City Room foyer of Manchester Arena at 10:31 in the evening on 22 May 2017, as concertgoers were leaving following a performance by Ariana Grande on her Dangerous Woman Tour. The attack killed 22 people in addition to Abedi himself and injured over a thousand others, with figures reported at both 800 and 1,017 depending on the source and the point at which injury counts were tallied. Many of those killed and injured were children and young people, reflecting the concert’s young fan base and giving the attack a particularly severe impact on families across the Manchester area and beyond.
A guard who backed away
A public inquiry into the bombing identified a specific, documented missed opportunity to intervene before the attack occurred. A security contractor employed by Showsec spotted Abedi behaving suspiciously at 10:12 that evening and asked him directly what was in his bag; when Abedi did not respond and the guard raised concerns about a possible bomb, he was told that British Transport Police were already aware of Abedi’s presence. Fearing accusations of racial profiling and hampered by heavy radio traffic that prevented him from escalating his concerns to colleagues, the guard did not pursue the matter further, a hesitation the inquiry later identified as one of several missed opportunities that, taken together, might have prevented the attack.
Radicalised abroad, fighting in Libya
Abedi’s path toward the attack traced back several years to his involvement in conflict abroad. Born in Manchester in 1994 to a Libyan refugee family, he travelled to Libya in 2011, at age seventeen, where he and his father fought alongside the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group against the Gaddafi government. He returned to Libya again in 2014 and was injured fighting for an Islamist group near Ajdabiya, during which period he reportedly made contact with members of the Islamic State-linked Battar Brigade and maintained some connection to that network after returning to the United Kingdom, a background that combined direct combat experience abroad with an ongoing ideological and possibly operational link to organised jihadist networks.
Known to security services, judged low-risk
British security services had prior awareness of Abedi but had assessed him as a low-level concern linked mainly to petty criminal activity rather than a serious terrorism risk. This assessment persisted despite multiple warnings from within Abedi’s own community about his extremist views, including his having been banned from at least one mosque, and despite an incident in which an imam recalled Abedi looking at him with open hostility after the imam had preached against the Islamic State in 2015. A subsequent internal review of MI5’s handling of the case found that the security service had acted too slowly in response to available warning signs, identifying missed opportunities in its own assessment process that paralleled the separate failures identified in event security on the night itself.
A brother who built the bomb
Accountability for the bomb’s construction fell most heavily on Abedi’s brother, Hashem Abedi, who was arrested in Libya, extradited to the United Kingdom, and convicted in 2020 of 22 counts of murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy for his role in sourcing explosive materials and helping manufacture the device his brother detonated. He was sentenced in August 2020 to life imprisonment with a minimum term of fifty-five years before parole eligibility, described as the longest minimum term ever imposed by a British court, a sentence reflecting both the scale of the attack’s casualties and Hashem’s substantial, hands-on role in preparing the weapon used to carry it out.
Ten million pounds in twelve hours
The public response to the bombing included a major benefit concert organised by Ariana Grande herself, whose initial social media reaction to the attack drew enormous public attention. The resulting One Love Manchester concert, held on 4 June 2017 at Old Trafford, attracted a global television and streaming audience exceeding one hundred million viewers and raised more than ten million pounds for victims within just twelve hours of the event airing. The UK’s national threat level was also raised to critical, its highest setting, for the first time since 2007 in the attack’s immediate aftermath, a status that lasted four days and involved the deployment of armed forces personnel to support police at key public locations across the country.