The brother of Martyn Hett, who was killed in the Manchester bombing, has appealed for people to stop using the tragedy to denounce immigration. Dan Hett, whose brother was one of 22 people who died in the blast at an Ariana Grande pop concert on 22 May, revealed that they were both the children of immigrants, like the suicide attacker, Salman Abedi.
The brothers were born in Manchester to a Turkish mother, originally from a Muslim family, though they were no longer religious, he said.
“As a young half-Turkish Mancunian, I’m not worlds away from this guy [Abedi],” Hett told the Guardian in an interview in Manchester. “The idea that somebody would say, ‘Oh, this is an immigration problem’ frustrates me. How is this an immigration problem? A UK-born terrorist took out, among many other people, my UK-born Turkish brother … In an alternate timeline, the roles could have been reversed.”
In a speech at Nato shortly after the attacks, the US president, Donald Trump, appeared to link mass immigration to the atrocity. Trump said there were “thousands and thousands of people pouring into our various countries and spreading”, shortly after declaring: “Terrorism must be stopped in its tracks, or the horror you saw in Manchester and so many other places will continue for ever.”
Hett, a Bafta-winning digital developer and artist, said: “I find it quite hard to reconcile what Theresa May says, and on a more extreme level, talk of closing borders and putting up walls to make things go away, knowing full well Salman Abedi is a UK-born, second generation guy who probably had the same accent as me.”
“The idea of this guy being such a close-to-home person has probably been the weirdest aspect to me. If he had got on a plane from somewhere, never been to Manchester, just been given our city as a target, it might be a bit different.”
He added: “All I can think about is: this is not an instantaneous thing. You’re not radicalised overnight. That’s what gets me. The problem is not with this one person, it’s the environment in which he was able to be radicalised and not monitored.”
Hett raised the prospect that the security services could potentially have done more. “Although I’m going to carry eternal gratitude to the emergency services and the police for what they have done, in a broader sense, the fact [Abedi] was known for petty crimes and had been reported repeatedly by his peers and not pulled up, that’s where my – not even anger – but my confusion comes,” he said.
“Both his religious and social peer groups were independently saying, ‘Trouble is going to happen here, he is reading this material, something’s going to happen’ … It’s frustration, not an anger thing. If there’s even a glimmer that this could have been avoided, I think that’s where the confusion lies.
“If any one of my friends had been making these sorts of threats, I’d have been banging on the police’s door and expected to be listened to.”
Hett, 31, is two years older than Martyn. Their parents split up when they were young and they grew up with their mother and two younger half-sisters in Heaton Moor, Stockport, having regular contact with their father and other step-siblings.
The brothers moved in different circles; the elder is a self-confessed “metalhead” who had been to the Manchester arena to watch Iron Maiden a week before Martyn – a Coronation Street superfan described by one friend as a “one-man hen party” – went to see Ariana Grande.
Dan Hett, who is married with two children, aged two and four, said he did not know Martyn was going to be at the arena on 22 May. Shortly before going to bed that night he read on Twitter that something had happened at the concert venue, tweeting: “Explosions/bangs of some kind happening at #victoria station, idiots already tweeting misinformation and conjecture. Shut the fuck up.”
He said he was “incensed” by the rumour-mongering, adding: “Social media is so good for spreading fear and worry.”
When he awoke on the Tuesday he had dozens of messages from his family and Martyn’s friends, asking if he knew where his brother was. He looked on Twitter and saw that Martyn had been at the concert. At 9.37pm he had tweeted about going to the loo while Grande performed a Macy Gray cover and “the entire arena” having the same idea.
For several hours the family told themselves that Martyn had probably just lost his phone – a regular occurrence. “He used to go through a dozen phones a year. He’d lose them or smash them on nights out ... We were joking, saying he’s going to fucking ring, he’ll have woken up on some guy’s couch, as he always does, smashed his phone, pissed up.”
Nonetheless, Hett put out an appeal, using a photo Martyn had sent to a friend over Snapchat shortly before the concert. Still, the family were joking, saying how Martyn, a notorious selfie-taker and airbrush addict, would have hated the shot. “He was a vanity shitstorm. He took his laptop to Turkey when we went a few years back so he could Photoshop photos of himself before he put them on the internet,” Hett recalled.
On Tuesday afternoon, Hett’s mum, Figen, asked him to join her at the Etihad, Manchester City’s ground. It had been turned into a support centre for families of the missing and was packed full of distraught relatives and an ever increasing stockpile of free food and drink donated by local businesses.
Hopes began to fade as more and more of the wounded were identified, and Hett recalled an official standing up and telling them that Oldham hospital had been designated the morgue for the attack. “He had to start talking about bodies instead of people. He started being realistic about timelines, saying, ‘Look, it’s a real mess in there, we don’t know if it’s going to be four hours or 10 hours.’ Every sentence he said, fresh howls kept coming from families around us. It was just harrowing. The worst thing I’ve ever heard.”
That evening a family liaison officer took the family to an executive box at the football ground and confirmed that Martyn had been identified from ID in his pocket. His body was the second to be pulled from the wreckage, found very close to where Abedi detonated his bomb. He was taken to the morgue at Oldham hospital, where Hett’s stepfather, Stuart Murray, a GP, went in first to do the formal identification.
While this was going on, Hett was being bombarded with interview requests from all over the world. Before his brother was identified, when Hett was still at home, a reporter pushed a card and a note of condolence through his door. He tweeted a picture of the note, saying: “I have dealt with 50+ journos online today. Two found my mobile number. This cunt found my house. I still don’t know if my brother is alive.” He said he was incensed by the intrusion.
A week on, he said he regretted the tweet, which went viral after various celebrities retweeted it. But he said he found it hard to cope with reporters ringing him up and knocking at his door at a time when he was still waiting for news about his brother’s disappearance.
“I was so highly strung and so stressed out and of course I would have answered the door because it might have been the police,” he said. “That was the aspect of it I didn’t like. It puts the onus on you because you don’t know if it’s going to be the police. I was thinking: how dare you divert my attention from this for a story? Doing this now on my terms is completely fine. Being thrust into a conversation with someone when it’s not on your terms, when you have this glimmer inside you that it might be good news from the police, that’s what made me tweet.”
He said he had been humbled by the reaction of strangers across Manchester. “I’m not a hugging person, but I have hugged every possible subset of human in the city. I’ve hugged a biker who literally had me off my feet. Yesterday morning I was in Sainsbury’s with my youngest son, feeding him crisps, and an old lady stopped us and gave us both a cuddle,” he said.
Martyn has been honoured by his favourite divas around the world, including Mariah Carey. On Tuesday the US talk show host Wendy Williams left an empty chair for him in the audience after finding out he had a ticket for filming – part of a two-month trip to the US that was due to begin last Wednesday.
Dan is proud of Manchester’s response to the tragedy, which has seen public singalongs and a mass tattooing movement based on the city’s symbol, the worker bee. “I know that whenever something like this happens people get very sentimental about their cities. And again it’s descending into cliche a little, but the reaction does really feel genuinely Mancunian.
“Everyone has been part of it, regardless of whether you’re a dirty metalhead or a flamboyant pop fan.”
