Brother of UK suicide bomber at Ariana Grande concert found guilty
A silence was held exactly one year after the bomb detonated. Photo: Getty
The brother of the bomber who blew himself up at the end of an Ariana Grande concert in the English city of Manchester three years ago has been found guilty of murdering the 22 victims.
Salman Abedi, a 22-year-old Briton born to Libyan parents, detonated his bomb at Manchester Arena as parents arrived to collect their children at the close of a show by the US pop singer in May 2017.
Among the dead were seven children, the youngest aged just eight, while 237 people were injured and 670 survivors reported suffering from psychological trauma.
Prosecutors had said his younger brother Hashem Abedi, now also 22, was just as guilty of the murders by helping his sibling to carry out the attack.
Hashem Abedi, younger brother of the Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi. Photo: Greater Manchester Police/AAP
“Hashem Abedi encouraged and helped his brother knowing that Salman Abedi planned to commit an atrocity. He has blood on his hands even if he didn’t detonate the bomb,” Max Hill, Britain’s Director of Public Prosecutions said in a statement.
London’s Old Bailey court was told Abedi helped his brother get the components of the homemade bomb and that together they experimented with its construction, buying screws and nails to be used as shrapnel.
They stored and made the device at a separate address in Manchester and, shortly before they returned to Libya in mid-April 2017, they bought a car to be used to store the bomb-making equipment.
Hashem Abedi was in Libya when the attack took place and became the first suspect to be successfully extradited to Britain when he was sent back in July 2019.
-AAP