Manchester Arena bomber was rescued by Royal Navy

Salman Abedi, who killed 22 people in an attack at the Manchester Arena last May, was rescued by the Royal Navy from the civil war in Libya three years before the attack.

It has been revealed that Abedi, who attacked an Ariana Grande concert with a homemade suicide vest, boarded the HMS Enterprise in Tripoli in August 2014 with his younger brother Hashem and more than 100 other British citizens, where they travelled to Malta before catching a flight back to the UK.

The Anderson review into the Manchester attack found that the decision to close Abedi’s case a month before his rescue was based on the information available to security services at the time. However, the news has also raised new doubts over whether anything could have been done earlier to identify Salman Abedi as a threat in the UK and also over the programmes in place to stop people becoming radicalised.