Father of Manchester bomber insists his son is innocent
The father of the Manchester arena attacker has insisted his son is innocent.
The bomber's identity has been confirmed by Greater Manchester Police after the attack which killed 22 people.
Ramadan Abedi says he spoke to his 22-year-old son, Salman Abedi, five days ago and he was getting ready to visit Saudi Arabia and sounded "normal."
The elder Abedi told The Associated Press by telephone from Tripoli: "We don't believe in killing innocents. This is not us.
"We aren't the ones who blow up ourselves among innocents. We go to mosques. We recite Quran, but not that."
The UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd said that Abedi had been known to intelligence services "up to a point".
The father-of-six said that his son visited Libya a month-and-a -half ago.
He said Salman, who was in his second year of studying economics, was planning to return to Libya to spend the holy month of Ramadan with the family. He denied that his son had ever been to Syria.
He said his other son, Ismail, was arrested in England on Tuesday morning.
He said Salman was planning to head from Saudi Arabia to Libya to spend the holy month of Ramadan with family.
Abedi fled Tripoli in 1993 after Moammar Gadhafi's security authorities issued an arrest warrant and eventually sought political asylum in Britain.
Now, he is the administrative manager of the Central Security force in Tripoli.
The Abedi family, however, is a close friend to the family of al-Qaida veteran Abu Anas al-Libi, who was snatched by U.S. special forces off a Tripoli street in 2013 then died in US custody in 2015. Al-Libi was on the FBI's most wanted terrorist list and was accused of having links to the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa.
The wife of Abu Anas told the AP that she went to college in Tripoli with Abu Ismail's wife, who was studying nuclear engineering. The two women also lived together in the UK for years before they returned to Libya.
"My message to the world is that there are hidden hands that want to tarnish the image of Muslims who live in the west," Abedi said.