Tripoli authorities are holding the father and brother of Salman abedi, the suspected suicide bomber in the Manchester bombing. A Libyan counter-terrorism unit, Rada, arrested 18-year-old Hashim Abedi on Tuesday evening on the suspicion that he has links to ISIS.

Ahmed Bin Salem, the spokesman of Rada, said the counter-terrorism force has evidence that Hashim and Salman are involved with ISIS. Rada has been monitoring Hashim for a month and a half, and was in contact with Salman. He also knows about the attack which killed 22 concertgoers and injured 50 more young people who attended Ariana Grande’s concert at Manchester Arena.

Six arrests in Manchester related to bombing incident

Besides Hashim, Tripoli officials also detained Ramadan Abedi, the father of Salman and Hashim. He is being interrogated, according to Bin Salem. Ramadan told investigators that the last time he spoke to Salman on the phone was five days before the bombing. He did not find anything wrong with his son, who told Ramadan that he would go on a pilgrimage to Mecca.

The father insisted that Salman did not belong to any jihadist organizations. The events confused the Abedi because Salman did not subscribe to the jihadist ideology or share the ISIS' beliefs. Ramadan believes there were hidden hands involved in the Manchester attack which he condemned as a terrorist act against civilians and innocent people.

On the same day, Ismail, an older brother of Salman, was arrested in a suburb of Manchester, the New York Post reported. Besides Ismail, a woman was also apprehended and detained after an armed raid at an apartment building in an area of Manchester called Blackley. In Wigan, a town in the greater Manchester area, authorities arrested a suspect with a suspicious package, bringing the total number of people arrested in Manchester to six.

Calls to UK’s anti-terrorism hotline

While Ramadan said that he was not aware of Salman’s plans, The Telegraph reported that Salman’s friends knew after he told them that being a suicide bomber was okay. His admission led some of his friends to call the hotline of the UK government’s anti-terrorism unit and inform the agency on five different occasions over five years before he bombed the concert on Monday.

People in the community were alarmed by the behavior of Salman and reported it through the proper channels. However, nothing came out of their reports, Mohammed Shafiq, chief of the Ramadhan Foundation, said. In 2016, two friends of Salman called the police counter-terrorism hotline to report Abedi’s support of terrorism, but nothing apparently happened.