Manchester bomber fought to topple Gaddafi 'during school holidays'

Abedi and his father, Ramadan, fought with the Tripoli Military Council, which was formerly headed by the controversial Islamist leader Abdelhakim Belhadj, according to BBC Newsnight's Gabriel Gatehouse.

Three different sources told the BBC foreign correspondent that Abedi had travelled to Libya during the summer holidays while he was still at school. Salman Abedi would have been 16 at the time.

"Like many at the time, they went in their school holidays in the summer. They finished school, they broke up, they went out to Libya," Gatehouse said on Thursday.

University dropout Abedi grew up in a Libyan family that had fled to Manchester to escape the now-fallen regime of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

His father Ramadan and younger brother Hashem were arrested in Libya, with officials there saying the brother was aware of the planned attack.

Abedi's brother Hashem had been under surveillance for six weeks, Libyan officials said, and investigators believe he was planning an attack in Tripoli.

A relative said Abedi himself had travelled to Manchester from Libya four days before the deadly bombing, which killed 22 people, including children.

British officials have confirmed Abedi had been "on the radar" of intelligence agencies before the massacre in Manchester.

In 2011, it was not uncommon for Britons of Libyan descent to travel to Libya to join the fight against Gaddafi. Many of those fighters came from Manchester.

The British government operated an 'open door' policy which allowed exiled Libyans in the UK to join the fighting

At the start of the uprising against Gaddafi, dozens of Libyans who lived abroad travelled home to take up arms alongside militia groups against the veteran strongman.

They were supplied weapons by Western countries and fought the regime as NATO aircraft provided them with air cover.

According to recent reports, the British government operated an "open door" policy which allowed exiled Libyans in the UK to join the fighting, even though they had been placed under counter-terrorism control orders - similar to house arrest.

Several former fighters now in the UK told Middle East Eye that they travelled to Libya with "no questions asked".

Other British-Libyans in London had control orders lifted in 2011 as the international fight against Gaddafi accelerated, with the government returning their passports in what appeared to be an invitation to travel to Libya to fight.

One British citizen who travelled to Libya told MEE that an intelligence officer who questioned him on his return from the country told him that "the British government have no problem with people fighting against Gaddafi".

A majority of the British citizens who travelled to Libya were former supporters of the now defunct Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), which was headed by Abdelhakim Belhadj.

The LIFG was proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the British government in 2005.

"The government didn't put any obstacles in the way of people going to Libya [in 2011]," one former fighter told MEE.

Post-Gaddafi Libya quickly turned into a breeding ground for heavily armed groups, including Islamists, some of whom were paid by transitional authorities to secure the country's borders.

Among them was the Al-Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Sharia which slowly spread its presence from Libya's second city Benghazi to Derna in the east.

Ansar al-Sharia was also present in Sirte, Gaddafi's hometown which the Islamic State group controlled for more than a year before they were routed by Libyan pro-government forces late last year.

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