Ramadan Abedi had done his best as a father, he insisted.
He tried to intervene with his sons when he “found their thinking is wrong”, but it hadn’t worked. He could almost have been shrugging off a set of flunked GCSEs, or some minor teenage brush with the law. But in fact that whiny, self-justifying message to his sister was written after his son Salman detonated a shrapnel-packed bomb in the crowd leaving an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, killing 22 people.
Nothing in the published note suggests empathy with all the other fathers who lost someone that evening, or with parents who roamed the foyer desperately in the aftermath of the explosion, screaming for their missing sons and daughters. Nor does it acknowledge what a judge-led public inquiry into the bombing concluded this week: that the 22-year-old suicide bomber’s mother, father and elder brother all held extremist beliefs, and shared responsibility for having radicalised him.
As teenagers, both Salman and his younger brother Hashem (now serving life for helping plan the attack) were taken by their father to his native Libya, where Salman is thought to have seen combat in the civil war and learned to build a bomb. While their parents went back and forth to Libya, the three sons were left in Manchester, where Salman Abedi mixed with drug dealers, gang members and Islamic State sympathisers. As the inquiry’s radicalisation expert, Dr Matthew Wilkinson, brutally put it: “I have never seen such a complete picture of the petri dish absolutely brimming with germs.”
But his parents, who did more than anyone else to create that toxic culture, seemingly have no intention of answering the questions that must haunt other bereaved parents. Now living in Libya, they wouldn’t engage with Sir John Saunders’ inquiry. Abedi’s older brother fled the country to avoid questioning and his younger brother, interviewed in prison, offered only a torrent of Islamic State propaganda the judge deemed unworthy of publication. No wonder Caroline Curry, who lost her 19-year-old son, Liam, alongside his girlfriend, Chloe Rutherford, in the bombing concluded in a statement so laden with grief and anger it was painful even to hear, that she wanted the rest of the family to face justice too. She would, she said, hold those around Abedi responsible for her loss, as well as MI5.
For if his family essentially made him what he was, it was the security services that failed to contain the consequences, and it’s the latter failure that has, understandably, dominated the headlines.
Despite appearing on the edges of their radar repeatedly from his teens, Salman Abedi wasn’t judged high risk or referred to the anti-terrorism Prevent programme. A series of human errors in interpreting and reporting on intelligence received before the bombing meant he wasn’t stopped at (or followed home from) Manchester airport when he returned from Libya only four days before the attack. Saunders couldn’t say for certain that would have averted tragedy, but found it was a “significant” missed chance. The victims might, in short, have lived.
He also notes that at the time the security services were under pressure from a heavy workload: in evidence heard behind closed doors, one officer described the team in the north-west as “struggling to cope”; they recalled telling their manager they were worried that “something inevitably would happen at some point”. The judge found that resource pressures had not caused chances to be missed in Abedi’s case, but might more broadly have influenced the lower priority placed on cases linked to Libya, at a time when fears were focused on Syria.
Saunders also submitted, alongside his public report, a separate file of recommendations deemed too sensitive to publish, for national security reasons. Whatever those might be, we are now expected to trust that a home secretary who this week was busy vowing to stamp out “political correctness in our national security” is on top of this impossibly complex issue.
The intelligence services must of course emerge from this with the tools and resources they need. But what happened in Manchester is also a powerful reminder of how much the petri dish matters. Saunders urged ministers to respond urgently to a Home Office-commissioned review into extremism two years ago that, among other things, suggested creating new offences of glorifying terrorists.
Since it’s only too easy to see how these could become dangerously sweeping offences, the report raises some difficult questions. But the point of government is to grapple with difficult issues, and that includes tackling extremist beliefs – whether Islamist or neo-Nazi – passed on at home. Somehow, we have to reach the next angry young man growing up, as the judge said of Abedi, so surrounded by extremist influences that he had almost nothing tethering him to “law-abiding society”.
In the aftermath of a tragedy this bleak, people often reach for the consoling cliche that love conquers hate. Sadly, all the love in the world is not enough when a young man walks into a crowded room with a rucksack filled with explosives: only professional skill, time and perhaps luck could have saved lives that night. What remains true, however, is that hate destroys and love creates. Several families bereaved that night have founded charities and campaigns from which others will benefit, and through which their loved ones live on. Raise your children to hate and, as the Abedis found, you risk being left nothing but ashes.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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