The Manchester Arena bomb plotter is understood to be held in the same secure unit as Southport killer Axel Rudakubana.
Terrorist Hashem Abedi, 28, was moved to Belmarsh, a high security prison in south London, after he allegedly attacked three prison guards with hot cooking oil at HMP Frankland in Durham last week.
Abedi – who helped his brother, suicide bomber Salman Abedi, plan the Manchester atrocity in 2017 – is believed to be in the segregation unit at the London jail, The Sun reported.
Rudakubana, 18, has been held there since he was sentenced to life behind bars for knifing three children to death while they attended a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport last summer.
The Ministry of Justice declined to comment when approached by MailOnline.
It is understood that inmates held in segregation units are not able to interact with one another.
But their role has recently come under fire after Abedi, who had access to a ‘self-cook kitchen’, hurled hot oil on three officers before attacking them with makeshift blades he fashioned from a cooking tray.
Writing in the Daily Mail, Conservative justice spokesman Robert Jenrick said the appalling attack must be a ‘turning point’.
Manchester Arena bomb plotter Hashem Abedi is reportedly being held in the same secure unit as Southport killer Axel Rudakubana
Rudakubana, 18, has been held in Belmarsh since he was sentenced to life behind bars for knifing three children to death last summer
He also warned that in Britain’s high-security jails ‘all too often, the ruthless Islamist extremists are in control, with prison officers left fearing for their lives’.
Prisons are ‘no longer places of punishment, but of appeasement’, he said, accusing officials of prioritising the ‘welfare of wicked individuals’ ahead of prison staff.
The Ministry of Justice announced a review on Sunday as gruesome details emerged of the attack at HMP Frankland, County Durham.
Abedi was known to be one of the most dangerous inmates in the UK, with a history of attacking officers.
He was ordered to serve a record 55-year minimum term for helping his brother murder 22 people, many of them children, at the Manchester Arena in 2017.
Yet he was given privileges including being allowed to cook for himself in a prison kitchen where he managed to create the blades.
Abedi is said to have dashed out of the kitchen just before lunchtime on Saturday clutching the weapons and a pan of boiling oil which he flung at the nearest three prison officers he encountered on a landing.
One male officer was then stabbed in the neck, with the blade coming close to severing an artery, reportedly leaving the victim ‘just millimetres’ from death.
Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice da Silva Aguiar were killed in Southport last summer by Rabukana
Another male officer was stabbed at least five times in the back, puncturing a lung.
One of their female colleagues was also injured. The boiling oil is said to have left victims with third-degree burns.
Mark Fairhurst, chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association (POA), has demanded an immediate ban on allowing serious terrorist inmates to use prison kitchens due to the risk they pose.
The attack took place in a separation centre, where Abedi has been a long-term inmate.
The centre, which holds fewer than ten prisoners, is used to contain those regarded as the most dangerous extremists – inmates who have refused attempts to deradicalise them.
Inspectors claim the facilities are an ‘opportunity for social interaction and the ability to develop essential life skills’, according to the latest report on HMP Frankland.
Months after he was jailed in August 2020, Abedi and two other inmates set upon two guards at Belmarsh Prison in south-east London, punching and kicking them like a ‘pack of animals’.
He was later sent to Frankland, which has housed other notorious terrorists, including Michael Adebolajo, who killed Fusilier Lee Rigby in London in 2013.
