Suicide bomber who slaughtered 22 ‘was known to police’: Attacker was CAUGHT on CCTV, claim sources as arrests are made across Manchester over arena massacre

From the Daily Mail

The suicide bomber who slaughtered 22 at Manchester Arena may have been known to police before carrying out last night’s atrocity, it has emerged.

An urgent police probe is underway this morning to determine whether the attacker acted alone or had accomplices as part of a wider terror cell.

Officers are also combing CCTV to determine whether he carried out a ‘recce’ of the arena before detonating a nail bomb as thousands were leaving the Ariana Grande concert at 10.30pm. 

This morning, police said a 23-year-old man has been arrested outside a supermarket in south Manchester in connection with the arena massacre. 

The suicide attacker is said to have been ‘known’ to the authorities and anti-terrorist officers are going through hundreds of hours of CCTV footage trying to ‘pick him up’ during his journey to the arena. 

Officers also believe that he will have carried out a ‘recce’ to the giant venue in recent days and a separate team are studying footage going back into the past week. 

Forensic and bomb squad officers are studying the remains of the device recovered so far but initial indications are that the bombmaker had used a ‘level of sophistication’ suggesting he had received training and not made it from ‘a terror recipe’ on the Internet. 

One security source told MailOnline: ‘It is unlikely that if the device was sophisticated that the suicide bomber made it – experience shows that organisations are reluctant to “waste” the expertise of a bombmaker in an attack, preferring to keep him or her for another attack. It is therefore highly likely that this terrorist is part of a cell or had a support network and they are the priority. Are there other devices, other terrorists out there and you can expect to see raids carried out in the next 48 hours linked to this.’ 

Experts say the bomber employed a ‘sophisticated’ method of attack using a a device packed with nuts and bolts, so-called ‘dockyard confetti’, to cause maximum damage.