By Jamie Prentis.
Tunis, 26 May 2017:
Benghazi’s acting mayor has spoken of his “utter disgust” that the Manchester suicide bomber who killed 22 people was Libyan.
In a letter to the mayor of Manchester, Abdelrahman Alabbar offered his deepest condolences and described the attack as an “awful and cowardly, criminal act”, drawing comparisons between what had happened in the northern English city and his own.
Alabbar told Mayor Eddy Newman that the background of the bomber, Sulaiman Abedi, came as “no surprise to us since we have been subjugated to even more horrific waves of terror for the last consecutive four years in the streets of Benghazi”.
He drew a parallel between Abedi living in close proximity to his victims and the Islamist terrorists attacking Benghazi who likewise often came from the same city as themselves. But they were an extreme minority.
“Those who have caused us major horror and havoc constituted only three percent of the overall Benghazi population,” Alabbar said.
“Yet, they managed to destroy Benghazi’s harbour and airports, the one and only university, close down nine out ten public hospitals, displaced more than 25 percent of city’s residents, and caused damage estimated to be more than 10 billion British pounds,” he claimed.
Alabbar asked God to “save and guard the people of Manchester and Benghazi” in ending his message.
