The suspected suicide bomber behind the attack at Ariana Grande’s concert in Manchester Arena which killed 22 people and injured dozens has been identified as 22-year-old Salman Abedi.
Born in Manchester in 1994, Abedi was a business student who dropped out of the university, says a media report.
Abedi was the second youngest of four children of a devoutly Islamic Libyan family who came to UK to escape the Gaddafi regime, a report in The Telegraph said.
It is believed that he was known to the security services and had turned to radical Islam in recent years.
It is quite surprising that the 22-year-old who carried out the deadly terror attack worshipped at a suburban mosque, where his father was a well-known face who sometimes performed the call to prayer.
"The perpetrator was Salman Ramadan Abedi, who was born and brought up in Britain," British Prime Minister Theresa May said, condemning his actions as "callous and cowardly".
According to The Daily Telegraph newspaper, Abedi’s family have lived in the Fallowfield area of south Manchester for at least 10 years.
One member of Manchester’s Libyan community told The Guardian newspaper that Abedi was a quiet boy, and was always respectful towards him.
“His brother Ismael is outgoing, but Salman was very quiet. He is such an unlikely person to have done this,” he said.
The Times newspaper cited Abedi’s school friend saying that he had recently returned from Libya. He left three weeks ago and returned in the last few days.
Police said that they were trying to ascertain whether Abedi worked alone, or acted as part of a larger network.
Abedi's family was closely linked to the Didsbury Mosque, a Victorian former Methodist chapel in a leafy suburb that was bought in 1967 by donors from the Syrian Arab community.
His father Ramadan had sometimes performed the call to prayer and his brother Ismael had been a volunteer.
One senior figure from the mosque, Mohammed Saeed, told The Guardian that on one occasion when he gave a sermon denouncing terror, Abedi stared him down.
"Salman showed me a face of hate after that sermon," Mohammed Saeed said, recalling his encounter with Abedi in 2015.
"He was showing me hatred."
The Press Association news agency cited a source saying that Abedi began studying business and management at Salford University in Manchester in 2014, but dropped out after two years and did not complete his degree.
Abedi used an improvised explosive device, apparently packed with metal, to kill people in the concert and end his own life.
The Islamic State has claimed responsibility of the attack. The terror group said that “a soldier of the caliphate planted bombs in the middle of Crusaders gatherings” and then detonated them. It did not say whether the attacker was killed.
The claim, however, could not be verified, top US intelligence official Dan Coats said.
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