Suicide Bomber in Manchester Arena, UK

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Terrorist incident at Manchester Arena 

Police shutdown central Manchester, early Tuesday morning, after a suspected explosion at the Manchester Arena killed 19 and injured 50.

Suicide Bomber suspected

The incident is thought to have occurred at 22.35 local time (21.35 GMT), at the end of an Ariana Grande concert as 20,000 + attendees were leaving the premises. Emergency vehicles streamed to the arena and helicopters circled above as police urged people to stay clear of the area.

As we all get more details about this event please post news below as a reply

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Ian Hopkins, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, said on Tuesday police were working with national police and intelligence agencies in their investigation into an explosion at UK's Manchester Arena. Hopkins confirmed 19 people died and around 50 others were hospitalised after the explosion at the end of an Ariana Grande concert on Monday night.

[Guest Nicole]

Manchester Arena attack: Eyewitnesses describe blast horror

Twenty-two people were killed in the explosion, including an eight-year-old girl.

A further 59 people, including 12 under the age of 16, were injured and taken to hospital.

Nick Haywood said finding his daughter Caitlin was 'like the best moment' of his life

Nick Haywood, 46, from Nottingham was waiting for his 16-year-old daughter Caitlin and her friend, also 16, when the explosion happened.

He said: "You could feel it, you could feel the noise. It was incredibly loud. My first thought was to find my daughter.

"People were already starting to filter out. You could tell something was wrong, no-one was laughing or chatting. Some people were running, a bit of mild panic.

"I was trying to get hold of them on the phone but the network was down so I made my way into the arena. Seeing her on the stairs was a huge relief.

"It was like she was almost born again. It was the best moment of my life all over again."

Caitlin had planned and saved up for the trip for months.

She said: "We were so excited when the day came and we were listening to her music on the train. We were so excited, but it turned out to be be a bad experience.

"When people said [the noise] was a balloon or a speaker, in the back of my head I knew it was a bomb and we needed to get out.

"I thought the next minute people with guns were going to start coming in."

She said she and her friend were near the front of the stage when the blast took place and she said people were getting crushed as they panicked and ran for the exit.

"As soon as Ariana Grande left [the stage] the lights went out and the bomb went off. That made me think that this person planned it so well."

Read more: 

Caitlin had planned and saved up for the trip for months.

She said: "We were so excited when the day came and we were listening to her music on the train. We were so excited, but it turned out to be be a bad experience.

"When people said [the noise] was a balloon or a speaker, in the back of my head I knew it was a bomb and we needed to get out.

"I thought the next minute people with guns were going to start coming in."

She said she and her friend were near the front of the stage when the blast took place and she said people were getting crushed as they panicked and ran for the exit.

"As soon as Ariana Grande left [the stage] the lights went out and the bomb went off. That made me think that this person planned it so well."

Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-40008026

[Jack Ryan]

[Guest Nicole]

‘Forgive Me’: Manchester Bomber’s Tangled Path of Conflict and Rebellion

MANCHESTER, England — Salman Abedi was wearing a red vest, his suicide bomb hidden in a small backpack, when he phoned his younger brother in Libya and asked him to put his mother on the line. It was about 10:20 p.m. on Monday, and the call was short.

“How are you doing, Mom? Please forgive me for anything I did wrong,” he said, and hung up.

A short time later, he walked through the glass doors of the Manchester Arena, the city’s biggest concert venue, lingered for a few minutes by the stalls selling merchandise related to Ariana Grande, the American singer who was performing there that night, and blew himself up, killing 22 people and wounding 116 more.

Since the attack, the police have taken 11 people into custody, and on Saturday Britain lowered its threat level from “critical” to “severe.” Officials are confident that they have captured the entire network. But the investigation continues into the network’s hierarchy, the precise logistics involved in planning the bombing, and what motivated Mr. Abedi.

The brief phone call to his mother — “forgive me for anything I did wrong” — encapsulated a deeply complicated family tale of conflict and rebellion, a complex interweaving of personal histories and the tortured recent history of Libya.

It is the story of a strict father’s flight from the repression of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Libya’s leader at the time, and a personal jihad against that dictatorship, which in turn shook up his children’s world.

The seismic tremors from Libya’s revolution in 2011 reverberated across geographical and generational borders, in Manchester’s sizable Libyan population — the largest outside Libya — and in the Abedi family as well. Almost certainly, the events that helped set Salman Abedi on his hauntingly familiar path, from quiet boy in a strict Islamic household to troubled young man to, eventually, suicide bomber, began there.

As Colonel Qaddafi tottered in 2011, Mr. Abedi’s father, Ramadan, returned to Libya to finish the fight he had started two decades earlier, and took his British-born teenage sons with him. The elder Mr. Abedi, a onetime Qaddafi enforcer, fled Libya in 1991 after supporting Islamists seeking to overthrow the brutal leader. Now, as Western warplanes pummeled Tripoli, the capital, that dream was finally coming true.

His sons — Ismail, Salman and Hashem — accompanied Mr. Abedi to Tunisia, where he worked on logistics for the rebels in western Libya. The sons knew very little about Libya, having grown up in the Whalley Range, a working-class area of Manchester. But their father, a proud Islamist, wanted them to follow in his footsteps at this euphoric moment.

Salman, a lanky 16-year-old at the time, joined his father as the Tripoli Revolutionary Brigade descended on the Libyan capital that summer. A year later, Ramadan snapped a photograph of the 15-year-old Hashem holding a machine gun.

“Hashem the lion… training,” read the caption on the father’s Facebook page.

They were not the only ones to make the journey from Britain. Akram Ramadan, who fought alongside Ramadan Abedi, recalled there being a strong contingent known as “the Manchester fighters.”

“We were all fighting,” Mr. Ramadan said in Manchester. “Drug dealers from here were fighting — everybody went.”

Continue reading

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So he "knew" what he was doing was wrong. Interesting.

Yet he went ahead with it.

Motivators could have been.... religious peer pressure? Threats?