The connections between Britain and Libya are more complex than you think

It was not unusual to see UK fighters joining the side of the rebels during the last days of the Gaddafi regime – but the vast majority of those returning settled back into their more familiar lives

“Hey, do you think there is any chance at all of speaking to someone who is not from Manchester?” was the plaintive plea from an American colleague after we had been chatting for a while with a group of young men at a street cafe with the subjects under discussion including the relative strengths of United and City in the Premier League.

This was in August 2011 in Sabratha, Libya, the latest city to fall to the rebels on the road to Tripoli, with the noose tightening around Muammar Gaddafi and his regime after months of relentless Nato bombing and the rebels – a better fighting force than in the shambolic early days of the revolution – proclaiming that victory was within grasp.

Sabratha, with layers of Phoenician, Roman and Byzantine culture, was a Unesco heritage sight. We had been admiring a basilica, with my colleague extolling about how one gets to see such wonderful sites in the middle of a conflict, when we were approached by an armed fighter in combat fatigues. He had heard us speaking English and was keen to introduce himself.

Akram Ramada had given up his job as an MOT inspector in Manchester to join the revolution in the country of his birth and he was pleased to meet us. Soon we were surrounded by a group of excitable fellow Mancunians who had also come to take part in the uprising.

The men, some of them very young, were heading for the Libyan capital and offered to take us with them. My colleague and I, after a chat, decided to decline. I ended up going to Tripoli with two other, British, colleagues to cover the very violent and chaotic last days as the city was finally taken amid acts of brutality by both sides.

It was not, however, unusual to see Libyans from Britain taking part in the war. They were among the more prominent of those from the Western diaspora who had gone to fight for the rebels with no hindrance from their governments. After all, it was David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy, who had been instrumental in launching the Nato military campaign in Libya with their cry of “Gaddafi must go”.

Many were from Manchester. One of the most prominent militant opposition movements, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) had a following there. Its one-time leader, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, is taking legal action against the British government over his rendition and that of his wife, Fatima Boudchar, by MI6 to the Gaddafi regime. I interviewed him when we got to Tripoli. The bodyguard who took me in to meet him at his headquarters, what was then the Radisson Blue Hotel, was from Cheshire.

The British connection continued as Libya descended into civil war and semi-anarchy. But those coming back tended, unlike some other returning fighters from conflicts abroad, not to get got involved in Islamist extremism in this country.

But that has changed. Khairi Saadallah, arrested over the killings in Reading, came to England with his family from Libya around six years ago, and there have been other instances of Libyan links to violence, most notably the Manchester bombing.

Sadallagh had initially lived in Manchester before moving down to Reading. He reportedly claimed to friends to have fought against the Gaddafi regime during the uprising, although there is, as yet, no evidence of that. His application for asylum, according to Whitehall officials, maintained that he would be in danger of he returned to Libya from the Islamist extremists.

Some of his Facebook contacts have expressed militant views: but there is no evidence, at this stage, that they and Saadallah belong to a terrorist linked group.

Last summer, however, MI5 received information from abroad that Saadallah was planning to return to Libya to take part in the ongoing conflict there. An investigation was started, but discontinued when it became apparent that the journey was not going to take place.

Salman Abedi, who murdered 23 people and injured 139 others in the Manchester Arena attack three years ago, was born to Libyan parents in England. He had taken part in fighting against the Gaddafi regime. His father, who also took part in the conflict, was a member of the LIFG. Salman Abedi returned to Libya in 2014 and joined a militia group in the civil war and may have been injured. There is also credible information that he had met members of the Isis Battar Brigade in Sabratha at that time.

Salman Abedi’s brother, Hashem Abedi, was arrested by a militia in Libya following a British request through the UN-backed government in Tripoli, and extradited to this country. He was found guilty of murder after a trail at the Old Bailey three months ago over the Manchester attack carried out by brother with evidence produced of active complicity.

Other countries, too, have been affected by terrorism with Libyan connections. Four years after the fall of Tripoli, I was in Tunisia, covering the massacre of 38 people, including British holidaymakers, on the beaches in Sousse. The killer, Seifeddine Rezgui, had trained at an Isis terrorist camp across the border in Libya. The camp was in Sabratha which had also supplied the gunmen who carried out an attack on the Bardo Museum in Tunis three months earlier: training there, Rezgui had told friends, were “two guys from England”.

In May 2017 MI5 launched an internal inquiry into warnings it had received about Salman Abedi and a second inquiry into how it missed the danger. The security service acknowledged that Libyans had been allowed to travel to Libya and fight against Gaddafi, including some who had been under house arrest as counter-terrorist measures.

In November 2018, parliament’s intelligence and security committee declared that MI5 had acted “too slowly” in its dealings with Abedi. The committee’s report noted: “What we can say is that there were a number of failings in the handling of Salman Abedi’s case.”

One needs to note, however, that the investigation into Abedi was taking place at a time of huge numbers of terrorism plots when difficult choices had to be made about utilising limited resources. We also need to remember that the Libyan expatriates going back to fight Gaddafi were joining rebels being backed militarily by the British government.

Despite the recent episodes of terrorism, it remains the case that the overwhelming numbers of those who went to Libya at the time have come back to this country and settled back into their more familiar lives.

I ran into Akram Ramadan and a few of the others in Tripoli, a few months after meeting them in Tripoli. They looked gloomy. I asked why. After all the capital was now “liberated” from Gaddafi. “It’s not that,” one shook his head. “You obviously haven’t heard the news from England. We got beat by City, 6-1 at home.”