How I came face to face with the man who turned his neighbours into terrorists

I was trying to find out why a group of six young men - all from the same estate - turned their backs on Britain and travelled to Syria to join ISIS.

And with each case I looked into, one name kept cropping up time and time again. Abdalraouf Abdallah.

Abdallah wasn’t able to travel to Syria. That’s because he was in a wheelchair after being shot fighting in the Libyan uprising against the Colonel Gaddafi regime in 2011.

He was paralysed from the waist down and returned from that war a hero. Unable to fight anymore, he became the recruiter and began radicalising young men in the area, including his brother, who became a sniper for ISIS.

I had so many questions for him, but I couldn’t put them to him because he was in prison, jailed in 2016 for preparing and funding terrorism.

Abdallah was released in November 2024, despite the parole board saying he shouldn’t be because he still held extremist views, just two months earlier.

So I set off on a journey I started nine years ago - to find him.

Myself, camera operator Shane Fennelly and security detail Luke parked about 80 yards away from the house.

But within a few hours, a woman left the family home and spotted us. She changed direction, got her phone out, walked towards us and began taking pictures of our car.

Busted. Luke advised us to leave the area and change the car.

On day two, we waited near a radical mosque I knew Abdallah and Manchester Bomber Salman Abedi attended together. That was before Abdallah was jailed and Abedi killed 22 people, including children, at the Ariana Grande concert in May 2017 in a suicide bomb attack.

And then, he appeared. Wheeling himself alone down the street. We were about 50 yards away so myself and the team ran up to him from behind.

“Excuse me, Abdalraouf Abdallah?’ I said panting out of breath.

He turned his head and I instantly recognised him.

“Are you still radicalising young men in this area?” I asked.

Abdallah looked down at his small bag, shook his head, and pulled out a phone. He began keying in a number and pressed call. I asked him if he knew what his friend was planning, but by this point, Abdallah was on the phone. He told me to leave him alone, so we left.

As we walked to our car in the next street, our security hurried us along: “He’s on the phone to his friends asking them to come down.”

As we approached the car, panic set in when two cars arrived on the scene. And they were looking at us. Then Abdallah whistled to us to come back. We didn’t. Luke was convinced it was a trap.

Instead, we left and - for me, at least - for the last time.

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Andy Hughes is LBC's Crime Correspondent and co-host of The Crime Agents podcast.

You can listen to The Crime Agents - with Andy Hughes and former Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner Neil Basu - on the LBC app.

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