Manchester bombing accomplices may still be at large, police say

Police fear accomplices of the Manchester Arena bomber could still be on the loose after raids in the south of the city uncovered materials similar to those used to kill 22 people on Monday.

Detectives believe the device used by the suicide bomber Salman Abedi was constructed in Manchester with help from others and that there may be more people at large who are part of a terrorist network. They also believe that more bomb-making materials have still to be found.

“The activities of Abedi and fears about the terrorist intent of his associates have led to troops on Britain’s streets,” said Chief Constable Ian Hopkins of Greater Manchester police.

Theresa May said the threat level would stay at “critical” which means hundreds of troops will continue to guard key locations in place of police officers as election campaigning resumes in full on Friday. Armed police were also deployed on trains “to protect and reassure the public”, although there was no specific threat to the transport network, said British Transport police.

Police arrested two more suspects in Manchester on Thursday, taking the number of men in custody to eight. Investigators believe they include some of Abedi’s “network”. Searches continued on Thursday night in properties in Moss Side and Withington, south Manchester, with bomb disposal experts assisting in Withington.

“The arrests we have made are significant and initial searches of premises have revealed items that we believe are very important to the investigation,” Hopkins said.

A man arrested in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, on Wednesday night had plastic bags placed on his hands and feet and a white protective suit placed over his clothes before he was taken away, apparently to preserve possible traces of forensic evidence. His was the only arrest made outside Greater Manchester.

Abedi used triacetone triperoxide (TATP), the explosive used in the 7 July 2005 attacks on the London transport network, according to the Republican congressman Mike McCaul, chairman of the House homeland security committee. TATP is highly combustible and dangerous to manufacture, but can be made from easily acquired chemicals.

Emerging evidence about the identity of Abedi’s associates, their terrorist intent and the fact they were still at large triggered the recommendation on Tuesday by the government’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre that an attack could be imminent and the threat level should be raised from severe to critical, the Guardian understands.

Abedi is believed to have travelled back to the UK from Libya just days before the attack, via Istanbul and Düsseldorf. He arrived in Istanbul last Thursday, a Turkish official said.

One senior security official expressed frustration that his name had not been flagged by European intelligence agencies: “If there’s a name of someone we believe to be a risky person, we could detect him.”

Abedi’s sister, Jomana, claimed on Thursday her brother’s motive for killing 22 people and injuring 116 at Monday’s Ariana Grande pop concert, was revenge.

“I think he saw children, Muslim children, dying everywhere,” she said. “He saw the explosives America drops on children in Syria, and he wanted revenge. Whether he got that is between him and God.”

The 22nd fatality was named on Thursday as 15-year-old Megan Hurley, from Halewood in Liverpool. She was one of nine teenagers to die in the blast, eight of whom were girls. The youngest victim, Saffie Rose Roussos, was eight.

Elaine McIver, 43, an off-duty police officer from Cheshire whose husband and children were injured in the attack, was also named among the dead. Five of the 18 adults who remain in hospital are in critical care, as are five of the 14 children still being treated.

MI5 is facing questions about its handling of multiple complaints about Abedi and his associates from members of the Muslim community in south Manchester.

In 2014, and again in 2015, a Libyan Muslim community leader in south Manchester contacted the national counter-terrorism hotline to tell them that Abedi “was expressing viewpoints that were extremist and he was glorifying suicide bombing and supporting Islamic State”, according to Mohammed Shafiq, the chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation based in Manchester.

Mohammed Saeed, an imam at the Didsbury mosque frequented by Abedi, said he warned counter-terrorism police in 2015 after a group of young worshippers objected to his anti-Isis stance and some threatened his life. But he said he was told there was nothing the authorities could do because it was a matter of “free speech”. The group included the bomber’s brother Ismail, 23, who was arrested in connection with the bombing on Tuesday.

Saeed said Salman Abedi had looked at him “with hate” after the speech, while Ramadan Abedi, the bomber’s father, had said on Facebook from Libya that the imam should be removed from the mosque for his stance.

“If the counter-terrorism officers had taken what I told them seriously, this tragedy may not have happened,” Saeed said.

There were also reports that in 2012 two people at Abedi’s college told police he had expressed the view that “being a suicide bomber was OK”, and that members of his family had also warned that Abedi was dangerous.

Security sources defended their position, saying that the threat being dealt with by counter-terrorism agencies was on an “unprecedented” scale and officers faced “difficult professional judgments” about where to focus efforts.

“MI5 is managing around 500 active investigations, involving some 3,000 subjects of interest (SOIs) at any one time,” a source said. “Abedi was one of a larger pool of former SOIs whose risk remained subject to review by MI5 and its partners.”

The decision to raise the threat level from severe to critical was made partly because of the emerging danger posed by Abedi’s network, but also because Britain had faced seven terrorist plots to cause mass casualties in two months, in the view of police and MI5.

Five were foiled following arrests in Westminster, north-west London and east London. Another alleged plot in London was also disrupted and an alleged plot in Birmingham involving knives and a brother and sister was thwarted.