Leaders of Didsbury Mosque attended by Arena bomber guilty of 'wilful blindness' to highly-charged debate about Libya conflict before atrocity, inquiry finds

The leaders of a mosque attended by Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi were guilty of ‘wilful blindness’ to highly-charged political debate about the conflict raging in Libya before the atrocity, the public inquiry into the atrocity has found.

But Didsbury Mosque was not an ‘active factor or cause’ in the radicalisation of suicide bomber Salman Abedi and his accomplice brother Hashem.

The south Manchester mosque was today (Thursday, March 2) heavily criticised in the third and final report of the public inquiry into the atrocity, which examined the radicalisation of the bomber, although it was not an ‘active factor’ in that radicalisation.

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Suicide bomber Salman Abedi, who murdered 22 innocents when he detonated a huge improvised device in his backpack at the end of an Ariana Grande concert at the arena on May 2017, and his jailed brother, Hashem Abedi, attended the mosque on Burton Road in west Didsbury as youngsters and their father, Ramadan Abedi, performed the call to prayer.

Ismail Abedi, the elder brother, volunteered in the mosque's Arabic school - and their mother taught there briefly.

A public inquiry into the atrocity concluded the mosque was ‘not an active factor or cause’ of the Libyan-heritage bomber’s radicalisation, although it criticised the ‘unreliable’ evidence of Fawzi Haffar, the chair of trustees at Didsbury Mosque who was accused of ‘wilful blindness’ about the charged atmosphere at the mosque before 2017 about the conflict in Libya.

Inquiry chairman Sir John Saunders praised the ‘generally truthful and reliable’ evidence of a liberal imam at the mosque, Mohammed El-Saeiti, who said in his evidence he was