Flowers are placed during a candlelit vigil to mourn the victims of Manchester terror attack at Albert Square in Manchester, Britain on May 23, 2017. (Xinhua/Han Yan)
Britain was placed on the highest terror threat level Tuesday night, less than 24 hours after the country's worst terror attack in 12 years hit Manchester, which left 22 dead and 59 injured.
"I SMELT GUNPOWDER"
"I heard a big bang and then I smelt the gunpowder," Liu Shixuan, a Chinese visiting Manchester, told Xinhua. Liu was staying just 300 meters away from the Manchester Arena where the incident happened.
"The sound was not a thunder. There are no such loud thunders in Britain," she said, adding that police vehicles were seen minutes after the explosion.
"Police copters hovered overhead throughout the night," Liu recalled.
On Tuesday night, helicopters could still be heard hovering around the area.
Police and security forces in Manchester continued Tuesday night to piece together the life of Salman Abedi, 22, the suspected suicide bomber who brought carnage and horror to an arena packed with 21,000 concert goers.
By detonating an improvised homemade bomb he sparked what was Britain's worst terror attack since the London bombings in 2005.
He struck with deadly consequences the moment thousands of happy, smiling fans started to pour out of the 21,000-seat arena after a concert by American singer Ariana Grande.
All night long, and throughout Tuesday some desperate families were still trying to find children caught up in the blast.
As security experts started to forensically build a picture of what happened, the names of some of the dead started to emerge.
Teen Georgina Callander, a rock solid fan of Grande, was the first to be publicly named as a victim. Eight-year-old Saffie Roussis is almost certainly Abedi's youngest victim.
Police are eager to establish whether Abedi was a lone-wolf attacker or part of a terror cell. It quickly emerged that he was born in Manchester, the son of refugees who fled Libya to make a new life in Northern England.
Media reports described how Abedi was a student at the University of Salford in the city that adjoins Manchester.
Security services and government ministers had continually announced a terror attack on Britain was likely, particularly after outrages in mainland Europe. But Britain felt safer, being an island country surrounded on all sides by water, thought to offer some protection against attacks.
What happened at the Manchester Arena Monday night shows that Britain is penetrable.
It is the worst ever peacetime attack in the city that sees itself as the de-facto capital of northwest England. Even when a pro-Irish Republican bomb squad caused havoc to the city center with a huge bomb in 1976, there were no fatalities, only wrecked buildings.
