Pupil's imagined talk with Manchester Arena bomber wins award

A Muslim primary school pupil from Lancashire has been praised after a speech she wrote imagining a conversation with the Manchester Arena bomber.

Eleven-year-old Sara Hussain from Blackburn won a public speaking competition with the speech, which was inspired after a friend survived the bombing two years ago.

Both girls are big fans of Ariana Grande, who had just finished her concert at the arena when Salman Abedi detonated a bomb, killing himself and 22 others.

Sara’s friend survived and Sara says she became “very angry” when she heard that Abedi, a fellow Muslim, had used his religion to justify terror. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Manchester attack on 22 May 2017, calling Abedi a “soldier of the caliphate”.

In her prize-winning speech, Sara – who hopes one day to use her orating skills as prime minister – imagines inventing a time machine, so she could return to that day and persuade Abedi against carrying out his deadly attack.

She describes herself walking down a street in Manchester and seeing him trundling a suitcase he is believed to have used to transport bomb ingredients.

“I’d run for my life to try and catch up to him, to catch up to Salman Abedi, continuously I would say stop, please, talk to me.

“Tell me why you are doing this. What makes you think that this will justify your actions? How can this possibly be for your religion?

“I would explain what Islam teaches us. That he isn’t doing it for me.

“Then I would try my hardest to show him that there’s no need to do this, that this isn’t an option, that there is no need to injure and harm so many innocent people.

“Because for what reason was he doing it? To make people hate and fear Muslims? Because Islam is about peace, not terror.”

Sara, a year six pupil at Wensley Fold CE primary academy, reduced the entire teaching staff to tears with her speech, according to the headteacher, Donna Simpson.

“We are so proud of her: she is a very mature, thoughtful young lady. Before Sara performed at the competition she did a practice run in assembly, in front of 450 of us. There wasn’t a dry eye among the staff, and many of the children cried too. Because we are so close to Manchester and the children love Ariana Grande’s music, it really affected them all,” she said.

Many pupils at Wensley Fold are Muslim and have struggled to understand Islamist extremism, said Simpson. “They are very proud to be Muslim and don’t understand why these things happen. They come and speak to us and ask what are these people doing in the name of our religion?”

The two-year anniversary of the attack on Wednesday will be marked by a private service for the bereaved and injured at Manchester Cathedral.

Like last year, at 10.31pm – the exact anniversary – bells will ring out from buildings across the city centre including Manchester town hall, Manchester Cathedral and St Ann’s church.

Last week Manchester city council invited artists to submit designs for a permanent memorial to the attack, to be situated between Manchester Cathedral and Chetham’s school of music, close to the arena.

An inquest into the 22 victims will not open until April 2020 at the earliest, as attempts continue to extradite Hashem Abedi, the bomber’s brother, from Libya.

Last month Libya’s interior minister told the BBC that a Libyan court had agreed to return 21-year-old Hashem but that plans for his extradition were on hold while Tripoli remains under attack.