Manchester atrocity: UK government must come clean about its relationship with Libyan Islamists
NOVANEWS
By Mohamed El-Doufani
The suicide attack on a concert hall in Manchester in which 22 people were killed and another 166 wounded throws light on Britain’s ill-conceived and dysfunctional policy towards Libya, past and present. While Muammar Gaddafi was in power, this policy drove the UK to welcome Islamists as potential tools to destabilise his regime, and since his ouster in 2011 it led it, along with the United States and the United Nations, to push for dialogue with Islamists of the same ilk as those behind the Manchester atrocity
The perpetrator of the Manchester atrocity, British-born Libyan Salman al-Abedi, 22, was not your bog-standard, homegrown terrorist: the prodigy of Muslim immigrants who failed to adjust to British culture or who had fallen under the wrong influence...