Late on Monday 22 May 2017, a suicide bomber killed 22 people and injured more than 100 at the Manchester Arena. In the week that followed the people of Manchester came together in the face of the terror, while police and security services worked tirelessly to trace down the terror network behind the bomber. This is the piece I contributed to for Deutsche Welle on the day after the attack.
Manchester has long been a tolerant, mult-cultural city, home to a range of ethnicities and religions. In this piece I explore how the city has changed for the better since I moved here 11 years ago, and I explore the way in which it might change in the wake of the terror attack.
As the week came to an end, I wrote this piece trying to capture the mood in the city as people were coming to terms with what had happened. Towards the end of that week, the city itself was trying to move on. Manchester has traditionally been a diverse community priding itself on tolerance and inclusion. So how would an attack, attributed to radical Islam, affect this northern UK city? This is my radio piece for Deutsche Welle looking back at the week that terror came to Manchester.