Victims or Actors? Part 7

Manchester Arena

Nobody wakes up in the morning and decides to be a conspiracy theorist. People are not inclined to stand apart from, and risk the disapprobation of, their peers. When people speak out against an official narrative it is usually because they have encountered evidence that contradicts what they have been told. To be the teller of confronting truths is not always a comfortable or attractive task.

The evidence that has provoked Richard D Hall and Iain Davis to question the official account of the Manchester arena event is footage of the foyer known as the City Room in which a bomb is said to have exploded (at 22:31 on 22nd May 2017). In testimony given to the Saunders Inquiry into the incident, Professor Anthony Bull from the UK’s Centre for Blast Injury Studies explained the horrific effects expected of the TATP bomb alleged to have been detonated there. The bodies of people within 10 metres of the blast wave would have been blown apart and for those within 20 metres of it, 30 kilograms and 3,000 pieces of rotating shrapnel would have added to the carnage.

In a video taken by John Barr four minutes after the detonation, there is no evidence of damage of this nature to people. There is no evidence of any structural damage to the City Room. A merchandise stand remains upright and undisturbed and white doors appear intact and unmarked. Electric lights and posters are unaffected. In short, it does not look like a bomb has gone off. There are also not enough people in the images to match the official story of 22 dead and 38 seriously injured.

Aisling O'Loughlin argues that we might be being asked to look in one direction when we should be looking in another.

While photographs are not reality and footage can sometimes mislead, it is very difficult to accommodate an alternative explanation as to why the bomb site does not look like a bomb site. No explanation has been provided by officialdom because the Barr footage was not considered by the Inquiry into the event. John Barr was not invited to give evidence. Barr and his son were 15 to 18 metres from the blast and among 40 uninjured people and 30 more with minor injuries who left the room. The Barr footage is supported by a photograph taken by Chris Parker and by BBC footage in which blurring obscures the lack of damage to bodies.

People lie but the physical evidence does not. At the very least this footage is worthy of further investigation. Aisling O'Loughlin is dismissive of it, saying,

"there are embedded investigative journalists on this side of the fence, they've been there a while, they have won the favour of people who might have seen through the covid hoax but their job is to mislead, and I would say with the case of Richard D Hall he misled his followers so that now they believe there was no bomb and no real victims on the night of the Manchester bombing."

O'Loughlin is also one of the journalists who, 'won the favour of people who saw through the covid hoax,’ but neither her opinion nor that of Hall's, changes the evidence. It is just as notable that there have been, for a long time, mainstream journalists who are bought by the intelligence services to mislead people by pushing official narratives.

Further evidence of the Manchester event is offered in a video made by Nick Bickerstaff in which, oddly, he films himself looking for his daughter after he says he has just witnessed people being, "bashed into bits and half their bodies are everywhere.” A siren and public address warning began approximately thirty seconds after the incident but these do not feature in the Bickerstaff video which runs for one minute and forty-seven seconds.

Bickerstaff does not emote fear or distress to passers-by, some of whom mimick him as though he is a figure of fun. In his video there is no evidence of the panic or stampede that occurred after the explosion. One young man, Jordan Kenney, who is captured in the Bickerstaff video reaching for his wallet as he approaches a bar, was actually in the main arena during and immediately after the blast.

Bickerstaff filmed his video by blocks 107 and 108 in the concourse around the main arena but the people passing him don't seem to have noticed the grisly torso of a suicide bomber “outside block 106,” where it was reportedly found by Inspector Mike Smith and others, although later this was contradicted and became the source of controversy. CCTV shows no torso, blood or splatter at this location, and no evidence of the torso anywhere.

From this evidence Iain Davis surmises that Bickerstaff filmed his piece before the detonation and thus that there was foreknowledge of the event.

In the Barr footage victim Ruth Murrell is seen walking and placing her weight on a leg that was injured by a bolt that apparently passed through it without piercing her jeans. The nature of her injury means that it should not be possible for her to be walking. Richard D Hall observes that, "the video of Murrell walking after the blast is the only close up footage we have of an injury and it appears to be completely fake."

The Saunders Inquiry recorded that Ruth Murrell was standing next to Michelle Kiss when Kiss was struck in the head and killed by shrapnel. CCTV footage of the blast shows Murrell on the steps from the arena concourse to the City Room but Kiss is not there.

Iain Davis notes that, "Michelle Kiss is one of the few murdered victims who were not standing in a CCTV blind spot," and, "the official reported circumstances of her death are not true."

Witness David Lambert reports, "body parts everywhere," in the concourse although officially all the dead and injured were in the City Room. In the City Room, Lambert walked past, "where the merchandise stall had been earlier," and witness Josie Howarth said the, "merchandise stand blew to pieces," yet in the Barr Footage the merchandise stand is shown unmoved and intact and there is no evidence of 30 kilograms of shrapnel.

As with 7/7 when there were reports of the alleged suicide bombers fleeing to Canary Wharf, a man matching the description of the alleged bomber Salman Abedi seems to have fled the Manchester arena in a grey Audi before being stopped by police at gunpoint.

The Audi had been under observation because the man had been seen running from it to the arena carrying a black backpack. 30 kilograms (66 pounds) is a lot to carry when running. The description of the suspect from a member of the public matched Abedi's appearance before any details of Abedi had been released. Abedi's background strongly suggests that he was an intelligence asset.

Darren Buckley saw the bomber, "just ripped in two cos I remember seeing his guts on the floor and stuff, but there was no top part of the body," but none of what Buckley saw in the foyer is evident in the Barr footage. Numerous witnesses to the event witnessed a bright flash at the moment of detonation. This flash was caught by dash cameras in cars parked outside the arena, but TATP bombs do not create flashes.

Leaving the concert early to avoid the crowds, witness Jenny Brewster found, "a row of stewards stood in a line stopping us getting through," to the City Room and as she, "turned around, Boom, one loud noise." A witness known only as Freya had a similar experience. The official Kerslake Report stated that the Room was sealed by Showsec stewards after the blast but not before it, as these witnesses describe.

Viewing the event from the mind of a terrorist looking to cause maximum damage and horror, why not wait until the crowds exited the concert? Why not bomb the more crowded concourse or main arena? From the mind of someone faking the event the City Room provided an area that could be secured. The foyer also provided a close exit for, “an Asian male, [who] put down a rucksack, and ran out of the area,” according to a witness report to police. There also appears to be 30 seconds of missing CCTV footage after the bang during which the scene could have been staged. A similar amount of time was required to stage the effects of a fake car bomb attack in Baghdad, that was reported as real by the mainstream media in 2016.

The Inquiry found that emergency co-ordination had been riddled with ‘mistakes,’ that kept first responders away from the foyer. For 44 minutes only one North West Ambulance Service man responded in the City Room and it seems eventually only three did so, but that none of them treated any casualties. Instead, the arena's Emergency Training UK staff attended to the victims. Footage shows people walking through the bomb site and even through spots where people were officially recorded as dying that were not marked or secured as part of a crime scene.

The bungled emergency response repeated mistakes made in a drill at Manchester’s Trafford shopping centre a year earlier, on 10^th May 2016. Operation "Winchester Accord," involved 800 crisis actors and simulated a suicide bombing using a pyrotechnic device. Rather than serving to correct mistakes, it appears to have functioned as a dress rehearsal for them to be repeated.

In the aftermath of the arena event, injured people were apparently moved to a Casualty Clearing Station set up on Victoria Station concourse. Saunders recorded that, “Between 23:12 and 23:42… 33 casualties” were moved, “all but eight of them…on makeshift stretchers.” This risky evacuation at the rate of one per minute served no medical purpose but it did limit access to the alleged bomb site. Somehow the evacuation was not captured on CCTV. Paramedic Simon Butler who was present that night from 23:10- 02:30, said that although there was blood on the floor and on clothing, "I didn't see anyone actively bleeding."

Nine minutes after the evacuation the ETUK personnel who had nursed the dead and wounded were recorded on CCTV without any visible blood on them.

Government approved forensic pathologists established the causes and times of deaths but no independent coronary reports were conducted. Inquests were not performed and further investigation was limited to the Saunders Inquiry which had predetermined that the deaths were the result of a bombing at the Manchester arena. The Inquiry did not consider the Barr or Bickerstaff footage. Death certificates were eventually issued in 2023, six years after the event. In reaching his conclusions Saunders referred to seeing footage from CCTV and body-worn video cameras, rather than high resolution crime scene photographs, which, as with any post-mortem photographs, have not been made public.

Iain Davis accepts that there is the risk of curious investigators being given "bum steers," and being "manipulated," to arrive at erroneous conclusions by withheld evidence that could then be released to frame dissenters as, "crazy conspiracy theorists." Equally, people inclined to believe the official story can be provoked to dismiss valid evidence by weak or speculative offerings such as the analysis of witness comments offered by Hall. As Davis says, the only way the truth of the Manchester arena event can be established is by,"examining the Barr footage in the public forum," and answering the questions it poses -but that seems unlikely to happen.

*where sources are not provided the information is taken from ‘The Manchester Attack, An Independent Investigation,’ by Iain Davis, digital versions of which are available for free here.

Part 8 is here.