Never-before-seen photos show Manchester bomber Salman Abedi at a rally organised by Jeremy Corbyn’s pro-Palestine group – two years before he killed 22 people

An exclusive from the Daily Mail

New pictures show Manchester bomber Salman Abedi at a demonstration organised by Jeremy Corbyn’s pro-Palestine group two years before he killed 22 people in the terrorist atrocity.  There is no suggestion that either the PSC staff or Mr Corbyn knew Abedi.

Two years earlier the suicide bomber was outside Downing Street to protest against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to London.

A public inquiry into the events leading to the bombing heard last week that signs of Abedi’s radicalisation went back several years, meaning that he had already been on MI5’s radar in September 2015 when he attended the PSC protest.

Later on the same day, Abedi, far right, attends a protest outside
the UAE embassy in London

He came to the security service’s attention at least 18 times before the attack, including for his attempts to travel to Syria and his links to Islamic State fundraisers. But an investigation into Abedi was ended in July 2014, despite the fact that he went on to associate with terrorists a number of times before carrying out the atrocity.

That protest was organised by the Libyan 17 February Forum, a British group that supported a Libyan Islamist militia aligned with Al-Qaeda’s Ansar al-Sharia group in Libya.

Some Libyan Muslims from Manchester had fought for the militia during the civil war in 2011. The rally called for the release of ‘brothers’ in Libyan prisons and condemned UAE’s backing for the insurgent warlord Khalifa Haftar.

Abedi first came to MI5’s attention on December 30, 2010, through his links to an address relevant to a subject of interest (SOI), an ongoing inquest heard. 

MI5 also had intelligence Abedi regularly travelled to Libya and that from 2015 onwards the service had ‘conflicting information’ he was espousing pro-Isis views. On three later occasions, Abedi was identified as a ‘second level’ contact of three other SOIs, in April 2016 and April and January 2017.

The SOIs involved were suspected of providing support or recruitment for Isis in Syria or Libya. And in both February 2015 and January 2017, he visited in two separate UK jails, Abdalraouf Abdallah, a convicted terrorist.

Abedi’s name also hit a ‘priority indicator’ during a separate ‘data-washing exercise’ as falling within a small number of former subjects of interest who merited further consideration. A meeting to consider the results was scheduled for May 31, 2017, nine days after the bombing. But even if MI5 had taken different decisions in the months before the attack it may not have stopped the bombing, the inquest was told.

The PSC and Jeremy Corbyn declined to comment.