Manchester Bomber Hails from Family of Jihadis

British authorities suggested on Wednesday that Manchester bomber Salman Abedi was part of a larger terror network.

“I think it’s very clear that this is a network that we are investigating,” Manchester police chief Ian Hopkins told journalists outside of police headquarters.

Several reports now indicate at least one terror network with which Abedi was involved may be his own family. Both of Abedi’s brothers and his father have been implicated as radical Islamic extremists.

“He was in contact with his brother, and he knew about the attack.”

On Wednesday Ahmed Bin Salem, a spokesman for Rada, Libya’s anti-terror force, announced that Abedi’s father, Ramadan Abedi, and younger brother, Hashem Abedi, were arrested in Tripoli.

Details of the father’s arrest were not disclosed, but Bin Salem said that Hashem Abedi is a known ISIS loyalist and suspected of collaborating with his brother.

“We have evidence that he is involved in Daesh [the Islamic State] with his brother. We have been following him for more than one month and a half,” said Bin Salem. “He was in contact with his brother, and he knew about the attack.”

The report comes only a day after British authorities arrested Abedi’s older brother, Ismail. The 23-year-old was arrested in Manchester on Tuesday in connection with the bombing.

And while the reason for the arrest of Abedi’s father, Ramadan, has yet to be disclosed, the Associated Press reported a possible link to al-Qaida.

Ramadan Abedi is a former member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an al-Qaida-linked organization, Abdel-Basit Haroun, a former Libyan security official, told the Associated Press on Wednesday.

A senior LIFG commander, Anas al-Libi, an associate of Osama bin Laden, was involved in the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, reported Fox News.

[lz_related_box id=”799721″]

Although the group has long disbanded, Ramadan is still a prominent member of the radical Salafist movement, according to Haroun. Salafism is the extreme fundamentalist strain of Sunni Islam, the poison wellspring from which the likes of al-Qaida and ISIS flow.

However, it seems not everyone in Abedi’s family is sympathetic to terror. It also emerged on Wednesday that Abedi’s own mother, Samia Tabbal, had warned authorities that her son was a danger.