Several arrests in Manchester and Libya in connection with the attack

MANCHESTER

• The father and brother of the kamikaze arrested in Libya, seven people in custody in Britain: the investigation into the Manchester bombing accelerated Wednesday and details emerged on the machine used by the killer.
  The tension remained palpable in the streets of the United Kingdom where the state of alert was strengthened at the "critical" level, the highest level, signifying a risk of imminent terrorist attack. A thousand soldiers have been deployed in sensitive areas in large cities to relieve the police.
• "Given the threat," Prime Minister Theresa May decided to shorten her trip to the Taormina G7 from where she will return on Friday evening instead of Saturday.
• After the arrest of Hachem, brother of Salman Abedi, at the family home in Tripoli, his father "Ramadan Abedi has just been arrested," a spokesman for a unit of the Libyan security services said.
• The brother, who claimed his belonging to the Islamic State (EI) group, "knew about the planned attack" on Monday in Manchester, where Salman Abedi, a 22-year-old Libyan-born British, blew himself up At the end of a concert, killing 22 people including several children and causing 64 wounded.
• Images of the British police reproduced by the New York Times show a detonator that the suicide bomber would have held in his left hand, pieces of metal and screws littering the ground, as well as fragments of a shredded blue backpack.
  These elements, analyzed by artificers interrogated by the daily, make it possible to deduce that the bomb was "powerful, endowed with an ultra-fast charge, but also that the pieces of metal were arranged carefully and methodically" to do the maximum Of damage.
• Arrested Tuesday, Hachem Abedi "said he belonged to the EI with his brother Salman Abedi (...) and admitted that he was present in Britain during the period of preparation for the attack" , Said the deterrent force, which serves as a loyal police force in the Libyan government of national unity (GNA).
  "Clearly" a network
• The attack on a concert by American pop singer Ariana Grande was claimed on Tuesday by the EI, which threatened to carry out further attacks. The attacks have multiplied in recent months in Europe at a time when the Islamic State group is suffering heavy military losses in Iraq and Syria.
• Hachem Abedi, who was born in 1997, "had been under surveillance for a month and a half" and "the investigative teams provided information that he was preparing a terrorist act in the capital Tripoli," the deterrent force added.
  A relative of the family living in Manchester told AFP, on condition of anonymity, that his brother Salman Abedi had visited Libya shortly before the attack and had returned to Britain four days before.
  In his journey, the suicide bomber "has undoubtedly" passed through Syria, said the French Minister of the Interior, Gérard Collomb.
• City police chief Ian Hopkins said the investigation was "clearly" on a network around the suicide bomber, born in Manchester of Libyan parents who had fled Muammar Gaddafi's regime.
  The escape of elements of the investigation into American media provoked the anger of the British authorities, who fear that they will weaken the investigation.
• On Wednesday evening, a new arrest took place in the city of Nuneaton in central England, bringing to seven the number of suspects apprehended by the British police.
• Previously, a woman had been arrested in a northern district of Manchester. Five people were arrested earlier, including four in southern Manchester. Among them, a man of 23 years and a certain "Adel", of Libyan origin and 44 years old.
  In front of the mosque of Didsbury, frequented by the suicide bomber, an official, Fawzi Haffar, affirmed that "this cowardly act" had "no place in his religion". He called "anyone with information to contact the police without delay".
  "Reentered, pierced, soldered"
• The outcome of the attack could worsen: about twenty of the 64 hospitalized patients - including twelve under the age of 16 - remained in intensive care on Wednesday night.
• Nick Lewis, the father of a seriously wounded schoolboy, described the nearly ten hours of surgery during which her daughter Freya "was sewed, pierced, soldered and reassembled under bandages. The slope is going to be long to go up but we start, "he said.
• The deaths have been identified and their relatives informed, police said, adding that a police officer was among them. In this list figure Saffie Rose Roussos, eight years old, the youngest known victim.
• A minute of silence will be observed throughout the United Kingdom on Thursday, when the campaign for the June 8 parliamentary elections will resume.