When Colonel Gaddafi was killed and his regime finally ended, Manchester’s Libyan community rejoiced.

Among those who welcomed his death were the family of Salman Abedi.

But just a few years later Salman Abedi’s name would become a byword for terror, just like that of the dictator whose rule the family had fled.

The Abedis were one of many Libyan families to make a home in Manchester as refugees in the 90s.

Many people within the Libyan community were united by a hatred of Gaddafi. While the vast majority of the new arrivals came to the UK for sanctuary are pro-democracy and liberal-minded, a minority have been accused of being sympathetic or indeed members of an organisation known as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) - an armed paramilitary group which for years sought to overthrow Gadaffi through insurgency.

It is understood that those seeking to plot against Gadaffi were known to British security services for many years.

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The attack on London’s Libyan embassy in the 1980s - had meant that many in Margaret Thatcher’s government looked favourably on any group seeking to overthrow the Libyan dictator Gaddafi.

But that tolerance evaporated in the 90s as Tony Blair’s government sought to make peace with Gadaffi and, following the events 9/11, the Ligf soon became linked by many international intelligence organisations as affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

They Lifg were banned as a terrorist organisation by the British government - and soon action was being taken in Manchester against those who were said to be involved.

In 2009, a Libyan man - living this time from Fallowfield, the same south Manchester neighbourhood where Salman Abedi lived - had his assets seized after the US government accused him of financing the LIFG.

Another refugee from Libya turned out to be an Al-Qaeda commander who compiled an exhaustive terror guide which became known as the ‘Manchester Manual’.

The 180-page document was found when Anas Al-Liby’s Didsbury flat was raided in 1999. He had close links to Bin Laden and died of liver cancer days before he was to go on trial accused of conspiring in the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

When Gaddafi’s regime was first threatened by 2011’s Arab Spring, a number of people from Manchester returned to Libya to fight, including teenagers from the south of the city.

The city was such a hotbed of anti-Gaddafi feeling that when Benghazi rose up against the colonel’s rule, his son Saif said it was the work of Libyans in the West - and included the Manchester community in a diatribe on state TV.

Back in 2011, an asylum seeker from Cheetham Hill was detained in Western Libya by pro-Gaddafi forces who accused him of raising funds for the LIFG, via Didsbury Mosque - which Abedi’s family attended.

It must be said that the family of the detained man denied the allegations and Didsbury Mosque denied ever having heard of him.

Also in 2011, a senior cleric at Didsbury Mosque was captured in Libya by pro-Gaddafi forces.

He told the MEN he was captured while trying to smuggle his 80-year-old mother out of the country, and that he was tortured by Gaddafi’s forces, who suspected him of being a spy -because of his British passport - and knew he opposed the regime.

There is no evidence to link the Abedi family to the LIFG.

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After living in Manchester for many years and raising a family in the city, Salman Abedi’s mother and father are understood to have returned to Tripoli following the death of Gadaffi in 2011.

Salman Abedi’s father, the man who led his family to Manchester seeking a better life, spoke in an interview with Associated Press.

He stated that his son Salman was innocent, adding “We don’t believe in killing innocents. This is not us.”

Mr Abedi, who reportedly fled Tripoli in 1993 after Gadaffi’s men issued an arrest warrant against him, confirmed his other son, IT worker Ismail Abedi, had been arrested by police.

Ramadan Abedi, who is believed to have returned to Libya to serve with the country’s Central Security Department, said Salman had been planning to head from Saudi Arabia to Libya to spend Ramadan with family.

Those who knew the family say that there was no indication that he would follow the path of a suicide bomber.

The MEN spoke to a friend of Salman Abedi’s mother who she would be ‘devastated’. The woman, a mother from east Manchester who is originally from Libya, said her son had been friends with the suicide bomber.

(Image: PA)

She confirmed the family had moved back to Libya after Gaddafi fell, adding that Salman and his brother stayed to study.

“My son he says, ‘why Salman, why?’ We say ‘why Salman why, why do this?’ They are a good family, very good people, his brother very good. I don’t know why this, and why now, we don’t understand. Why Salman I don’t know - maybe other people. They lived here 23 years and I’m friends with Salman’s mother. Islam is not like this, his actions are against the religion”, she said.

One of four children, Salman Abedi was born and brought up in south Manchester and attended Burnage High School for Boys, where he is remembered as being a Manchester United fan by some, and ‘rude, arrogant and egotistical’ by others.

What is clear is that the Salford University, in his second year of a business degree, grew up in a community where politics and faith were not just topics of debate, but could also be matters of life and death.

Investigators will now be examining his links to Libya, Libyan dissidents in Manchester and elsewhere in the UK, as well as his connections with young Mancunians from the wider community who have joined IS, in an effort to find out just who led him on the path to radicalisation...and mass murder.