On May 22, 2017, a suicide bomber murdered 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England. That bomber had been rescued from Tripoli, Libya, by England’s Royal Navy in 2014, according to The Guardian.
The bomber detonated a home-made bomb in the foyer of the Manchester Arena; 19 people were immediately killed; three more died at the hospital; 200 more people were injured. The bomber, his brother, and roughly 100 other British citizens were evacuated from Tripoli by HMS Enterprise, taken to Malta, then returned to the United Kingdom in August 2014.
A government spokesman stated, “During the deteriorating security situation in Libya in 2014, Border Force officials were deployed to assist with the evacuation of British nationals and their dependents.” The bomber’s name was on a list of stranded citizens handed to the crew running the evacuation; the bomber had been monitored by UK security forces before his rescue. The bomber’s brother is in jail in Libya, but the British government wants to extradite him because of the Manchester attack.
The bomber hung around other men in Manchester who wound up joining Islamic State. An Islamic State recruiter named Raphael Hostey worshiped in the same Didsbury mosque as the bomber.
According to the BBC, the bomber was born in Manchester; his parents fled Libya during the Qaddafi regime, moved to London, then settled in Manchester. His father did the call to prayer at a mosque in Didsbury.
The BBC also noted that the independent review of the Manchester attack revealed that the bomber had been actively investigated starting in January 2014, but by July 2014 MI5 officers closed his file. The BBC added, “He was officially classed as a ‘closed subject of interest of low residual risk’ who had limited engagement with genuinely dangerous people.”