Manchester Arena bomb plotter Hashem Abedi charged with three counts of attempted murder after four prison officers injured
Hashem Abedi, 28, was ordered to serve a record 55-year minimum term for helping his suicide bomber brother Salman murder 22 people, many of them children, at the Manchester Arena in 2017.
He allegedly attacked four guards at HMP Frankland, County Durham on April 12.
Following an investigation involving Counter Terrorism Policing North East, Abedi was today charged with three counts of attempted murder and one of assault occasioning actual bodily harm.
He was also charged with unauthorised possession in prison of a knife or offensive weapon.
Under new rules under which police have been told to release a suspect's ethnicity in high-profile cases, Abedi's background was today described as British but of 'self-defined' Asian ethnicity - despite his parents being from Libya in North Africa.
Abedi will appear at Westminster Magistrates Court next month and remains in custody.
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Daily Mail
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Chloe Ayling's secret life in Snowdonia: Glamour model has settled into a new flat in Welsh seaside town after kidnap hell
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She has since found solace in the mountains and lakes of the North Wales wilderness where she can enjoy horse-riding with barely a soul around. So outlandish was the sequence of events she described – and crucially how odd her unemotional account of the trauma appeared to be – those eight years on, questions still abound about whether she was complicit in the kidnap and it was all an elaborate publicity stunt. Łukasz Herba, a Polish national from the United Kingdom, was convicted in a Milan court of the kidnapping and sentenced to 16 years and nine months in prison. This month Chloe had her say on a BBC documentary 'Chloe Ayling: My Unbelievable Kidnapping' and said her undiagnosed condition of autism is partly responsible for her unusual reaction. 'What is it about me and this story that makes it so hard to believe?' she pointedly asked at the opening of each episode of the three-part BBC programme. The series followed a 2024 BBC dramatisation of the tale, Kidnapped. But in recent years, Chloe has moved away from the capital to the stunning but remote countryside of Snowdonia, North Wales, where she can indulge her love of horse-riding in the hills surrounding Mount Snowdon. A neighbour of hers in her house overlooking the Menai Strait to Anglessey told the Mail: 'She arrived more than a year ago and she seems to be quite a solitary figure when she's up here. 'She's polite and respectful and quite reserved. A lot of people here spend the Summer months in the area then leave in the winter. I don't know if she has somewhere else in England – maybe this is just a Summer place for her. 'She's quite distinctive, so people recognised her quite quickly, but as far as I know, no-one's asked her about her awful experience all those years ago.' A café worker at a nearby marina said he had noticed Chloe walking past regularly. 'She's not easy to miss because she's a gorgeous girl,' he said. 'She always says hello, but I've never really said much more than that to her.' In the BBC documentary, Chloe spoke about how she was drawn to Snowdonia. She told the interviewer: 'A couple of years ago I started coming to North Wales. I just fell in love with it. 'I saw a house for sale that I really loved and I just saw a vision of what I could transform it into. And then, spontaneous me decided to buy it.' Showing the film team around, she said: 'Shall we start with the view? I think this is the best part – being on the water.' She then opened a balcony door onto a stunning scene overlooking the distinctive waters of the Strait beyond. Asked why she chose the place, she laughed and said 'I'm here because it's such a beautiful place but I also like that no-one knows where I live.' Ayling's difficulty in expressing emotion was one of the main reasons the media and public viewed her story with scepticism. 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What Ayling was unaware of was that Black Death was not a far-reaching criminal enterprise, but an invention by Herba, and that he had enlisted the assistance of his brother, Michal, in snatching her from the studio. When Ayling's contacts failed to stump up the $300,000, Herba agreed to release her on condition she said nothing to the police and paid $50,000 within the month. He drove her to the British consulate, posing as a friend she had called upon her release. Neither of them knew that the officials there had been alerted to her abduction, and Herba was promptly arrested. Ayling's evidence helped convict him of kidnapping and extortion, with a prison sentence reduced on appeal to just over 11 years. 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'There are difficulties in social interaction, communication and repetition,' it reads. The diagnosis not only explains her 'lack of expression, no matter how hard I try', but also experiences that date back to childhood: 'My mum would come on school trips,' she recalls, 'because she was worried that I wouldn't be able to say what I wanted.' The case judge, Illio Mannucci Pacini, says in the programme: 'Interpreting the calm demeanour she showed as a sign of the absence of trauma is, I believe, a mistaken mechanism.' Or, as Ayling put it: 'Not everyone has to fit in the same box.'
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28 minutes ago
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Worthing man, 18, in hospital after Bognor Regis stabbing
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