The brother of a suicide bomber who killed 22 people at a UK pop concert in 2017 dumped his legal team on Thursday and refused to appear in court for the final stages of his murder trial.
Five weeks into his trial, Hashem Abedi, 22, waived his right to legal representation just days before a jury is due to retire to consider its verdicts on multiple counts of murder.
The trial will continue to its conclusion but without the presence of Mr Abedi. He has declined to give evidence and did not appear in the dock of the London court earlier this week.
The trial judge told the jury that Mr Abedi’s decision to “dispense” with his legal team should not be held against him when they consider their verdicts.
The prosecution claims that Mr Abedi is just as guilty as his older brother Salman, who strapped on a rucksack filled with explosives and blew himself up in the lobby of a music venue in Manchester on May 22, 2017, at the end of a show by US pop star Ariana Grande.
Prosecutors said the two brothers had a shared goal of killing, maiming and injuring as many people as possible at the Manchester Arena, which had a capacity of 21,000 people.
Mr Abedi’s “thundering silence” from the witness box was because he had been a willing accomplice to his older brother, prosecutor Duncan Penny told the jury.
He said that Mr Abedi had acted as a chauffeur, quarter-master and “munitions technician with electrical know-how”. He had stood “shoulder to shoulder with his now-dead brother” in preparing the attack, said Mr Penny.
The court has heard claims that Mr Abedi helped his brother to gather acid, screws, nails and other materials to make the bomb that was put together at a rented flat in the city.
He allegedly hoarded old cooking oil cans from the takeaway restaurant where he worked to make bomb parts, the court has heard. His fingerprints were found on some of the items, the court heard.
Mr Abedi travelled to Libya on a one-way ticket in April 2017 along with his brother Salman, who returned to Britain the following month to carry out the attack. Hashem Abedi was arrested the day after the atrocity by security forces in Libya.
He claimed that he was tortured in Libyan custody before he was extradited to the UK in July 2019 to stand trial.
Mr Abedi’s only comments to protest his innocence came in a prepared statement handed to police after his return to the UK, the court heard.
Mr Abedi, who denies the charges against him, said in the statement that he did not know anything about the plot to attack the concert venue.
“I was shocked my brother had done this and felt bad for everybody,” Mr Abedi said in the statement. He added that he had no sympathy for ISIS and would have told his mother if he had learned of his brother's plans.
But Mr Penny, in his closing statement to jurors, said that the statement was “demonstrably riddled with lies” and an attempt to dupe investigators.
His refusal to give evidence meant that he had avoided the opportunity to explain why he “like so many hundreds of others had been a victim of Salman Abedi”, said the prosecutor.
The trial has heard that the brothers showed signs of radicalisation in the years in the run-up to the attack. They lived together in south Manchester after their Libyan parents left the family home in 2016 to return to North Africa.
Hashem Abedi is accused of murdering 22 people, the youngest aged eight, the attempted murder of others who were injured, and a single count of conspiring with his brother to cause explosions.
The case continues.
