THE Manchester bomber had met members of an Islamic State unit linked to the November 2015 Paris terrorist attack on a recent trip to Libya, according to intelligence officials.
Salman Abedi, who killed 22 people at a concert by Ariana Grande, met with operatives of the Katibat al-Battar al-Libi, a core Islamic State unit that was headquartered in Syria before some of its members dispersed to Libya.
He is understood to have meet with the group in both the Libyan capital Tripoli, as well as to the coastal town of Sabratha.
The group is made up of Libyans who had gone to Syria to fight in the civil war and has attracted French and Belgian Jihadis, several of whom were dispatched to carry out attacks abroad including the attack in Paris in 2015.
Reports in the New York Times quote a retired European intelligence chief who claimed Abedi kept up contact with the group after returning to Manchester.
The source claimed that when Abedi was in the UK the contacts would sometimes happen by phone and if the content of the call was sensitive, he used phones that were disposable or dispatches were sent from Libya via intermediaries living in Germany or Belgium.
The paper also claimed Abedi’s contacts with the Battar brigade members in Libya were confirmed by a senior United States intelligence official and that his activities in Libya remained the focus of intensive investigations.
It said the Islamic State leadership had been actively coordinating with loyalists in Libya since at least the start of 2015, sending personnel back from Syria to help them establish their fledgling colony. Their Libyan province, headquartered in the port city of Surt, grew to become their most important outside of Iraq and Syria.
It said the first direct connection found between Libya and an attack in Europe was last December, when 23-year-old Anis Amri rammed a container truck into holiday shoppers in Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz, killing 12.
He was found with two Libyan numbers were found on his phone and a subsequent investigation discovered that he had traded Telegram messages with those numbers. Germany’s BND intelligence agency linked the Libyan numbers to the Islamic State.
Officials have also been reported as claiming al-Battar taught tactics to Paris ringleader Abdelhamid Abaaoud and those behind the beach attack in Tunisia where 30 UK citizens were murdered.
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