Manchester attack: UK threat level reduced from critical to severe – as it happened

Manchester police has confirmed it is searching another address in Moss Side after raiding a barbershop in the area.

26 May 201706.37 EDT

Man in custody 'rented property' to Abedi

Frances Perraudin

Mohamed Elhudarey, who runs the St Helens pizza shop that was raided by police this morning, has claimed that a friend who rented a property to Salman Abedi is one of the eight people in custody after the Manchester Arena attack.

Elhudarey said his friend Aimen Elwafi, 38, who helped him run Lorenzo Pizza in St Helens, found curtain fabric cut into squares, a strip of metal, and the fire alarms disabled when he re-entered the flat in Blackley, north-west Manchester.

Manchester police said on Friday morning that a 38-year-old man was arrested in Blackley on Thursday.

Elhudarey claimed Elwafi handed himself in to police to help with enquiries on Wednesday night when he saw the bomber’s photo on TV. He said Abedi had rented the flat after responding to his advert on Gumtree. The flat was rented for around six weeks for about £700, he said.

The flat was raided by police on Wednesday night and Elwafi is currently in custody.

Elhudarey, who is originally from Libya, says his friend knew something odd had gone on in the flat, and thought maybe Abedi had been smoking drugs, but it never occurred to him that he could be making a bomb. “We thought maybe they’d had parties in the flat, and were maybe drinking alcohol,” he says.

Abedi left the flat in a hurry after about six weeks around March, telling Elwafi he needed to get a flight to Libya and leaving many of his belongings behind. Elwafi found a sleeping bag and shoes, which suggested there had been other people staying in the flat. Elhudarey said Abedi’s younger brother had been with him in the flat.

Elhudarey has been looking after his friend’s seven-year-old son since he went into custody and had sought advice from a lawyer on his behalf.

Louise Bolotin, a journalist who lives in Granby House, describes Wednesday’s raid on a property that remains cordoned off.

When the fire alarm went off in the block of flats I live in on Wednesday, I grabbed my phone and jacket and ran down six flights of stairs to get out of the building. I assumed that when I exited the front door, I would see firefighters. Instead I saw a burly police officer in full tactical raid gear – helmet, face mask and submachine gun – and it took me a few seconds to understand what I was seeing.

I live in Granby House, the site of a major armed police raid where they executed a warrant to search a flat as part of the rolling investigation into the Manchester Arena terrorist attack. I was the first resident out of the building and also the first journalist on the scene. Once over my shock, I began taking photos and reporting on Twitter.

It was surreal. Part of my brain was in work mode – I was observing everything going on around me, making notes and being methodical. The other part of my brain was flooded with adrenaline and I was scared. It soon became clear that the fire alarm had been triggered at the very moment the police blew the door off the flat they were searching.

Processing the knowledge that the bomb-maker had hired the flat as a safe house to build his deadly device and Salman Abedi had been in the flat at 7pm last Monday to collect it before heading to Manchester Arena was almost impossible.

As the world’s media descended and began thrusting microphones into my face, as well as wanting the details of what was unfolding I was asked repeatedly how I felt and I didn’t know. How can anyone know what to feel in such bizarre and unusual circumstances?

Later, much later, when my partner arrived with wine and hugs I was emotionally exhausted. I think you’re supposed to cry at this point. There is supposed to be catharsis. I’d felt catharsis the evening before at the moving vigil outside Manchester’s Gothic town hall, in the company of 10,000 other Mancunians. But my eyes remained resolutely dry.

At 2am, too wired to sleep, I rang the Samaritans and howled like a baby at last. Talking to a detached stranger enabled me to let go in a way that chatting to my neighbours, friends and partner couldn’t.

As I write, the Tactical Aid Unit officers are still inside Granby House searching for evidence. Granby House was originally an Edwardian packing warehouse for a catalogue company that is still based in the city. Derelict in the 80s, it was used as a semi-legal nightclub during the Madchester rave scene. In 1990 it was one of the very first abandoned warehouses to be converted into apartments at the start of Manchester’s renaissance.

Today, it will forever be notorious for being the place where terrorists holed up before their deadly killing spree. We residents desperately want life to return to normal. It is likely to be months or even years before that happens.

• Note: we have removed reference from this post to the flat being rented through Airbnb after it proved to be incorrect.
  

The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is about to give a speech in which he will draw a link between British foreign policy and terror attacks. You can follow it here on our politics live blog.

26 May 201706.07 EDT

Steven Morris

The search still continues at Granby House in Manchester city centre, where Salman Abedi is thought to have spent the final hours before the attack.

As well as working in the third floor flat, which looks out on the main rail line, officers in forensic suits have been searching through large bins in the building’s basement.

The flat was let out by its owners on a short term basis. One resident, Louise Bolotin, said a neighbour who lived on the third floor had reported seeing a man of Middle Eastern or North African appearance coming and going from the flat in the days before the raid.

Bolotin said: “This man tried to kick his dogs. He has chihuahuas that can bark a bit. We don’t know who the man was – whether it was Abedi or an associate.”

The flat was raided on Wednesday. Bolotin said: “It’s scary to think that there may have been a bomb here. If it had gone off accidentally it would have brought half the building down.”

While the new raid in Moss Side continues, the cordon around the nearby Barbershop has just been lifted, according to PA.

The front door where a shutter was cut apart is set to be boarded up. Police recovered items including a laptop from the barbershop raid, Sky News reports.

In Manchester city centre a cordon remains around Granby House on Granby Row where the bomber Salman Abedi is believed to have spent time in the hours before the attack.

And in St Helens, Merseyside, police investigating the bomb attack have raided a pizza shop (see earlier).

Here’s confirmation of the ages of those arrested so far.

It is the first full breakdown of the arrests made in the investigation to establish whether there was a network behind Salman Abedi’s suicide attack.

In total, 10 individuals were detained between Tuesday and Friday. All were held “on suspicion of offences contrary to the Terrorism Act”.

A 16-year-old boy arrested in Withington on Thursday and a 34-year-old woman arrested in Blackley on Wednesday have been released without charge.

Before police returned to the address in Moss Side, resident Anita Santinelli describes the first raid, when she saw two men being taken away in two vans.

26 May 201705.44 EDT

Jamie Grierson

Police are re-raiding a property just entered by the Guardian after officers left earlier taking away three men.

More residents on a street in Moss Side, south Manchester, have talked at their shock of being woken up by armed police in balaclavas in the early hours, writes Helen Pidd.

A woman who lives a few doors down from the raided terrace property said: “It was police in balaclavas, at least 20 of them, maybe even 30, they had machine guns. I’ve never seen as much action ever. It was like being in a bloody film. I thought we’d had enough from gangs around here. It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Lots of police. People shouting. We did stay up because I kept expecting a controlled explosion but we didn’t hear one.”

Twenty-eight people are listed as living in the two-up, two-down house that was searched by police.

26 May 201705.32 EDT

Jamie Grierson

Police have just returned to a Moss Side property it raided this morning after making at least one arrest.