Bomber Salman Adebi spoke to his nuclear scientist mother on the phone in Tripoli shortly before he detonated the device on Monday night.

A Libyan security source told the BBC’s Newsnight that Abedi rang his brother in Libya, telling him to get their mother Samia Tabbal to call him.

It also emerged that Tabbal, 50, graduated from Tripoli university 'top of her class', it was said.

Salman Abedi, the suicide bomber who took the lives of 22 people in Manchester. His mother is a graduate who left Tripoli University at the top of her class

News sources in the US, citing intelligence officials, have said Abedi's mother was fearful her son had been radicalised.

It has also been claimed that she told authorities her son had been radicalised.

The terrorist's family had informed on the 22-year-old as they feared he had become 'dangerous', a US intelligence official told NBC.

It has been revealed Tabbal is a close friend of the wife of a former Al Qaeda commander who once featured on the FBI's World's Most Wanted Terrorists list with a £20million bounty on his head.

The Al Qaeda veteran, Abu Anas al-Libi, spent five years in Manchester - having won political asylum in Britain in 1995.

Salman Abedi's father Ramadan, who was arrested in Tripoli

He was later suspected of helping to plot the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

The near-simultaneous atrocities in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi killed 224 people and left 4,500 people injured.

His wife Umm Abdul Rahman revealed yesterday she went to college in the Libyan capital with Abedi's mother, who was studying nuclear engineering. She said the two women also lived together in Manchester for a number of years.

Al-Libi returned to Libya from the UK in 2000, and was captured by U.S. Special Forces from a street in Tripoli in 2013. He died in custody two years later aged 50.

Last night a close family friend told the Mail: 'I am sure Salman's mother and father are very shocked by what he did.

'It is very sad because their mother is very intelligent. She told my wife that she was a nuclear science engineer and that she got excellent marks in her exams. She graduated top of her class from Tripoli University.'

Another top jihadist with links to south Manchester is master bombmaker Abd al-Baset Azzouz, 48, once listed by the U.S. as one of the 10 most dangerous global terrorists.