Manchester, England and Tripoli, Lybia
Re: Terrorism and National Leaderships

Salmon Abedi, Manchester Arena Suicide Bomber

Salmon Ramadan Abedi, the man believed to be responsible for Manchester Arena bombing, was reportedly known to authorities, according to CBS news. (Dailycaller.com) Born and raised in Manchester in 1994, Abedi, the second youngest of four children, grew up in a Muslim household. His parents, mother Samia Tabbal and father Ramadan Abedi, a security officer, are Libyan-born refugees who fled to the UK to escape Gaddafi. It is thought they returned in 2011 following Gaddafi’s overthrow. Abedi is thought to have an older brother Ismail Abedi, who was born in Westminster in 1993, a younger brother Hashim Abedi, and a sister Jomana, whose Facebook profile suggests she is from Tripoli and lives in Manchester. Abedi is believed to have attended the Manchester Islamic Centre, also known as the Didsbury Mosque. The paper quoted a friend as saying he had returned from a three-week trip to Libya in recent days. (Telegraph.co.uk)

Abd al-Baset Azzouz

A group of Gaddafi dissidents, who were members of the outlawed Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), lived within close proximity to Abedi in Whalley Range, Manchester, England. Among them was Abd al-Baset Azzouz, a father-of-four from Manchester, who left Britain to run a terrorist network in Libya overseen by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s successor as leader of al-Qaeda. Azzouz, 48, an expert bomb-maker, was accused of running an al-Qaeda network in eastern Libya. The Telegraph reported in 2014 that Azzouz had 200 to 300 militants under his control and was an expert in bomb-making. LIFG claimed responsibility for a failed assassination attempt against Gaddafi in February 1996, which was in part funded by MI6. (Telegraph.co.uk) The father of four came to the UK from Libya in 1994 and was arrested in a 3am raid at his home in Manchester in May 2006. He was detained for nine and a half months before being released on bail. (Daily Mail) The 48-year-old left Britain in 2009 and allegedly went to Pakstan to join Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda following the death of Osama Bin-Laden. (Dailymail.co.uk)

A leader of the LIFG, Abdelhakim Belhadj, became the commander of the Tripoli Military Council after the rebels took over Tripoli during the 2011 Battle of Tripoli. On March 2011, Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, a leading member of the group, admit to the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore that his fighters had al-Qaeda links. Al-Hasidi was captured in 2002 in Peshwar, Pakistan, later handed over to the US, and then held in Libya before being released in 2008. (Wikipedia.org)

Libyan President Fayez Mustafa al-Sarraj

After Libya's 2014 elections, Libyan government was split between the Islamist-dominated New General National Congress in Tripoli and the internationally recognized legislature of the House of Representatives in Tobruk.