Salman Abedi’s crimes against humanity should not be used to justify abandoning our duty to refugees

It is absurd to refuse to rescue British citizens from civil wars or natural disasters because one day, without any indication of extremist tendencies, they might commit atrocities

So, now we know a bit more about the history of the Manchester suicide bomber, Salman Abedi – and we realise just what an ungrateful bastard he was. The Daily Mail can be credited with discovering that he was rescued by the Royal Navy, no less, from the Libyan civil war in 2014. Abedi was scooped out of Tripoli and on to HMS Enterprise, whence he was taken to Malta and then put on a flight home to Britain – he was a British citizen. We all know what happened after that; the murder of 22 innocents at an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena, a further 139 injured and untold human misery and suffering.

By the time of that attack, on 22 May 2017, it is obvious that Abedi was a dangerous terrorist. But was he such in August 2014 when he accepted the aid of a country, Britain, of which he was a citizen and which he later betrayed, treasonously, and went to personal war with?

It is by no means clear that he was. He was the subject of some interest from the intelligence services, as someone with a Libyan background and someone who, with his brother, travelled there frequently. You might argue that was unfair, but then the security services can be forgiven for erring on the side of caution in the fight against terror. Yet they did not seem to think, at that stage, he was much of a threat. The Anderson Review into the Manchester attack found that the decision to close Abedi’s case as a “subject of interest” was sound, based on the information available to security services at the time. By 2017, Abedi was being monitored, and the security services narrowly missed thwarting the attack.

The more awkward truth, then, may be that Abedi, like so many other “home grown” terrorists – Islamist extremists, far-right so-called British nationalists, the various Irish paramilitaries, even the likes of the Soho bomber who conducted a short terrorist war against gay and BAME people – was not radicalised abroad before 2014, but, at least in part, may also have been radicalised in Britain after that, and on subsequent trips to Libya. Radicalisation is a process rather than an event, and is not inevitable, irreversible or predetermined by background, as Abedi’s siblings demonstrate.

Abedi, therefore, was not some sort of fifth columnist smuggled in on a refugee boat, was not an actively groomed and trained agent of al-Qaeda or Isis, but simply yet another victim of the death cults, and one who should have been stopped – but not necessarily when he clambered aboard HMS Enterprise.

It’s an insidious suggestion, then, that the Manchester bombing would not have happened if Abedi had been left in Libya. What would the justification for that have been at the time? You would have had to possess supernatural abilities in order to peer into his future and see that he would eventually turn evil and murder people. You could not have denied a British citizen, any British citizen, aid and assistance on the grounds that they might, in due course, become a terrorist, just as you could not lock everyone in the country up because one day they might go on the rampage with a machete.

Had we left the Abedi brothers in Tripoli, his innocent brother, who did not go on to become a mass murderer, might have also lost his life along with Salman. It is, as I say, absurd to refuse to rescue British citizens from civil wars or natural disasters because one day they might, say, mug a pensioner or rob a bank or vandalise a phone box.

By the same token you cannot abdicate the duty to take in genuine refugees on the grounds that they might become terrorists. You can, certainly, refuse to take in asylum seekers who are bogus, who are not fleeing for their lives, who are criminals of any kind (people smugglers, drug dealers, gun runners, whatever). The state also has a moral obligation to check who is coming, who they are, and what their intentions are. But you cannot see into the future. A nation without crime is nation without people. And you cannot monitor everyone. Even the Mail, who broke the story, had to concede the point in their editorial; “The security services knew he’d been to Libya, possibly fighting with Islamist groups, so why didn’t they keep track of him on his return?”

A perfectly reasonable question that, to which the answer is provided in the question itself – “possibly”, and that suggests the evidence was not damning enough in 2014. And, besides, Abedi did turn up on their radar later on. With hindsight of course he should have been tracked, or barred from being rescued, but hindsight is a gift from God only ever given to journalists, and should be used with care.

Ingratitude, then, is certainly something Abedi was guilty of, ingratitude to a country that had given his family sanctuary and security, and offered him education and opportunities, and probably saved his neck. The same goes for any other terrorism born in Britain or not, Muslim or not, brown-skinned or not. In any case, ingratitude is hardly the greatest of Abedi’s crimes against humanity.