A Brief History
On May 22, 2017, an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena in Manchester, England, was rocked at the end by a horrific terrorist attack by a man of Libyan descent in the name of ISIS.
Digging Deeper
Salman Ramadan Abedi, age 22, and his co-conspirator brother, Hashem Abedi, age 20, were deemed responsible for the suicide blast that killed 22 innocent concert goers and Salman. Hashem was found guilty of 22 counts of murder, but only got a 55 year prison sentence due to British law protecting people less than 21 years of age from life in prison sentences.
Salman had been born in Manchester and was said to be not particularly smart and the victim of frequent bullying. He gravitated toward criminal buddies and a radical Islamist point of view. A frustrating fact of this horrible incident was that Salman’s family and some community leaders had previously warned police and authorities of the possible violent tendencies of Salman. Additionally, a security guard was alarmed by Salman’s appearance at the arena, but took no action out of fear of being labeled a racist!
Along with the 22 innocent deaths, another 239 people were injured and hundreds more suffered psychological ill-effects from the terrible experience. Once again, the sad truth had been proven, that people with evil intentions do not need guns to cause death and sorrow.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Coase, Kathryn. 2,000 Years of Manchester. Pen & Sword History, 2019.
Hoehn, Frederick. Manchester Bombing: terrorism. Kindle, 2017,
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Ardfern of a participant on the Great Manchester Run displaying an “I Love Manchester” sign on his clothing, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.
