The explosion last night in England, at the Manchester Arena, occurred just as fans and their families were leaving a concert. The venue, which was playing host to Ariana Grande, seats more than twenty thousand guests. In the initial confusion, some of those attending or standing outside thought that the loud bang might have been part of the show’s balloon-enhanced finale. It was not.
In the early hours of the morning, Greater Manchester Police confirmed that this had been a terrorist incident. A man had detonated an improvised explosive device in the foyer of the arena, where merchandise was being sold and parents were waiting for their children to emerge. Currently, the death toll stands at twenty-two, and the number of wounded at fifty-nine. Many of the injuries were reportedly caused by metal nuts and bolts, which had been packed around the explosive as homemade shrapnel. In summary, therefore, we know that someone deliberately chose a place full of teen-agers and children; a time where they could be expected to congregate en masse; and a means of assault that would guarantee widespread damage and pain. One of the dead, Saffie Rose Roussos, was eight years old.
Recent terrorist attacks in Nice, Berlin, and London were carried out with nothing more than a speeding vehicle. The deployment of a rather more sophisticated weapon is a worrying change of tactic, not least because the perpetrator will almost certainly have required practical help and material supplies from other people of similar intent. Not all wolves are lone; many of them need the services of a pack. Whatever the case, the outcome is the worst such attack since the London bombings of 2005, in which fifty-two lives were lost.
Campaigning for the general election, which is set to take place on June 8th*, has been suspended. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the crime, though its claim has yet to be verified, and the suspected bomber has now been named as Salman Ramadan Abedi, age twenty-two. He was born in Manchester, to a family of Libyan origin.
The physical geography matters here. Bags were searched as guests entered Manchester Arena, but the bomber struck immediately outside that secure zone, in a public area; how can you guard against that, whether at a concert hall or an airport? In the immediate aftermath, panic and bewilderment spread among those who were still inside the venue and struggling to get out; there were reports of a frightening crush. The arena adjoins Victoria Station, a major rail hub, which remains closed. Some people who had travelled quite a distance to get to the show were stranded in the city, unable to return home and dependent on the assistance of the authorities, hotels, or local residents. Offers of spare rooms nearby appeared on social media.
A few hundred yards from the arena is the Arndale Centre, a large shopping mall containing more than two hundred stores. After Osama bin Laden was killed, by American forces, in 2011, files were recovered that pointed to the Arndale Centre as a possible target for a terrorist strike. A suspect, Abid Naseer, had been arrested in Manchester in 2009 but released without charge; in 2015, however, he was tried in New York and found guilty of conspiring to support attacks on both sides of the Atlantic. One plan, the jury was told, had been to set off a car bomb at the Arndale Centre over Easter weekend, and then to trigger smaller devices at the exit doors as shoppers fled. The fronts of the stores themselves would become instruments of harm. The prosecutor, the Assistant U.S. Attorney Zainab Ahmad, claimed that the explosion would have sent “glass shattering through the city centre.” (My colleague William Finnegan recently wrote about Ahmad’s prosecutions.) Time, place, and destructive power: all the elements of last night’s horror had been proposed before.
Manchester knows about such things. In between the Arndale Centre and the Manchester Arena lies Corporation Street, where, in 1996, an enormous truck bomb went off—the largest bomb, it is said, to have been detonated in Britain since the Second World War. The entire area was devastated, and repairing the effects of the blast took many years and cost an estimated $1.5 billion. The I.R.A. had planted the device, which weighed more than three thousand pounds; a warning was issued, by telephone, an hour and a half before the explosion. This allowed some seventy thousand people to be evacuated, although hundreds were still hurt by flying glass. But nobody died, and we are left with a bizarre imbalance: one man wearing a suicide vest or backpack can cause more human suffering than a loaded truck. Also, the campaign waged by the I.R.A. eventually came to a close after a political solution—uneasy, and to some observers unsatisfying, but still holding today—was achieved. It is impossible to conceive of such a solution now. No specific political goal is being sought; no talks are in progress; no warnings are ever issued; no end is in sight.
*An earlier version of this post misstated the date of the general election.