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

27 May 201706.13 EDT

Details emerge of suspects in Cheetham Hill

Josh Halliday

It is believed the two men who were taken away by police in the latest raids were brothers in the same friendship group as the Manchester bomber.

Neighbours identified Yahya and Mohamed Werfalli, aged 20 and 22, as two of the occupants of the house raided by armed police on Saturday morning.

Officers used a controlled explosion to blow open the front door to the family home on a quiet street in Cheetham Hill at around 2am. Neighbours described how their houses shook as about 30 police officers, many armed, stormed the building.

Separate raids also took place in Moss Side, where police are now evacuating residents.

Three neighbours independently identified the Werfalli brothers from pictures. One close neighbour, who did not want to be named, said she saw the brothers being led away by police following the explosion.

“I just heard the bang and I was so scared. I woke about 2 and the bang was about 3. I thought it was another bomb,” she said. “I’ve never been to their house. I’ve been here 13 years and they were here before me. The dad isn’t here, he lives somewhere else. They’re Libyan.”

GMP said on Saturday morning that two men, aged 20 and 22, had been arrested in connection with the search.

Yayha Werfalli, the older brother, is understood to have had a connection on social media with Abedi’s younger brother, Hashim.

Others neighbours said the Werfalli family are Libyan and have lived in the three-floor property for six or seven years.

Majid Khan, 43, who lives opposite the raided property, said the brothers wore traditional Islamic clothing and that their father worked as an engineer in Sharjah, a city on the Persian gulf. He added: “They were very nice people. I’m surprised. I’ve known them about seven or eight years. They were friendly.”

Another neighbour, Aftab Aslam, 30, said he heard one of the arrested men “screaming and and loudly crying” as he was led away by police.

“I was up at 2 and just heard a big band. Very loud. Everybody came out on the street and police started shouting: ‘Go inside, go inside!’,” he said. “There were 12-15 police cars, maybe more including undercover. I thought it was something like a car explosion then I came out and cops were everywhere.”

27 May 201706.02 EDT

Evacuation under way in Moss Side

Helen Pidd

An evacuation in Moss Side is under way as part of an ongoing search linked to the Manchester bombing, Greater Manchester police said.

Our reporter Helen Pidd is on the scene:

A number of streets in Moss Side have been cordoned off after bomb disposal experts arrived in a big van from the Royal Logistics Corps.

The activity seems to be on Boscombe Street, where a neighbour says they saw at least one person being taken away in the last hour.

The cordon is being widened minute by minute with bit of Yew Tree Road, Thornton Road and Horton Road closed off, plus Boscombe Street.

A police helicopter is circulating overhead.

Greater Manchester police has tweeted this update on developments in Moss Side:

Shortly before leaving the scene of the Moss Side raid, Helen Pidd noticed two more police vans turn up. She has sent this tweet:

Jason Burke, the Guardian’s African correspondent, has assessed claims that Libya – the home country of Salman Abedi’s parents – has become a “hotbed” for Islamic extremism. Experts, he writes, say that the situation is far more complicated and warned against exaggerating the strength of jihadi groups in the country.

Isis has been forced out of the two cities on the Mediterranean coast it once controlled and, though it still has a presence in Tripoli and elsewhere, has scattered into shifting desert camps. Its propaganda now rarely mentions Libya, which United Nations experts once mooted as a possible alternative base for the group if it was expelled from its strongholds in Syria and Iraq.

Al-Qaida uses the remote south of Libya as a rear base for planning and logistics but has no territorial control and does not seem to be seeking to expand. Local groups, such as Ansar al-Sharia, are fragmented and weak.

Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said: “Libya is relevant but not at the forefront” of Islamic extremist activity across the region.

Those off to see the Courteeners at Manchester’s Old Trafford stadium have been asked not to bring large bags or rucksacks, or indeed “flares, smoke bombs or any kind or pyro”.

27 May 201705.36 EDT

Helen Pidd

Helen Pidd, our north of England editor, has tracked down the house in Moss Side were arrests were made yesterday. She writes:

Five police officers are guarding a terraced house in Dorset Avenue, the cul-de-sac in Moss Side where arrests were made on Friday. Several plain-clothed officers wearing blue plastic gloves have come out of the property in the last few minutes.

Greater Manchester police would not confirm whether this was the property where searches are under way on Saturday, but it looks like it.

Neighbours said there had been officers stationed outside the property for 24 hours but that they didn’t know who lived there.

The editor-in-chief of the New York Times has said he has “no regrets” about publishing pictures from the scene of the Manchester bombing, after they were leaked to the paper by sources in US intelligence.

Questioned about the disclosures on on the BBC’s HardTalk programme, Dean Baquet brushed aside criticism from the UK’s National Police Chiefs’ Council, which said they undermined the investigation into the attack. “We live in different press worlds,” he said.

When our police say that, we say: prove it. They didn’t prove it: I don’t buy it. I don’t buy that this hurt their investigation. We have thoughtfully, carefully published information that we publish after every terror in the world - and we should.

Baquet pointed out that his paper published similar pictures after terror attacks in the US, including the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Boston marathon bombing on 15 April 2013. He also said that the distribution of the Manchester pictures among US agencies was not restricted to the most secret level.

“It was at the level of secrecy that made it much more widely dispersed than people are acknowledging,” he said.

27 May 201704.40 EDT

Josh Halliday

Our reporter Josh Halliday has captured this video of an interview with a neighbour of the house in Cheetham Hill that was raided last night.

Describing the scenes, Aftab Aslam said:

Police were just screaming, shouting at everyone: ‘Go inside, go inside; nobody [is] allowed to come out and nobody [is] allowed to be filming.’ So everybody was just watching from the windows.

Here’s some more news on the events that are – and are not – going on this weekend, thanks to PA.

Going ahead on Sunday:

• Great Manchester Run. Thousands of defiant runners and spectators are expected to turn out for the 10k race. Participants should have received direct instructions from organisers by email.
  
• Vitality Westminster Mile, London. Organisers said they are working closely with the Metropolitan police, the mayor’s office and other authorities on additional security measures for runners and spectators on the Mall.
  
• Radio 1’s Big Weekend day two, Hull. Concert-goers should expect the same security measures as were in place on Saturday.

Not going ahead on Sunday:

• FA Cup victory parades: Both Arsenal and Chelsea have said the victors will not stage street parades on Sunday to avoid placing additional pressure on the police.
  

One of Barack Obama’s top aides has said that the former US president expected more investment from David Cameron and other European leaders to rebuild Libya after the US and allies helped to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi.

Ben Rhodes, a former foreign policy adviser at the White House, said that Obama’s expectation was that “there would have been a greater investment in the security force building from Europe”.

Salman Abedi, the suicide bomber who killed 22 concertgoers in Manchester on Monday, was the son of Libyan emigres who had left the country because of their opposition to Gaddafi’s government. Arrests since then by police trying to capture the suspected terror network that supported him have largely focused on Manchester’s Libyan community.

Rhodes told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday morning:

I think we’re sympathetic to the challenges of doing that in a country that is not hospitable to foreigners coming in and providing that type of capacity building.

I think, looking back, the window closed faster than people thought.

I think people thought there was going to be a longer timeline to build up institutions in Libya, and, frankly, within about a year following when Cameron and (then French president Nicolas) Sarkozy travelled to Libya, within a year essentially it was going to be impossible to put things back together.

Rhodes also said the transitional Libyan government “lost control of violence in the country”. He said

When I look back on that I think we all believe we should have done better. What began as a humanitarian intervention led to the removal of Gaddafi, and then there was just an enormous vacuum and nothing filled that vacuum except for the militias on the ground.