The Sunday Times May 1, 2022 11
El-Saeiti’s employment in 2020 after he
raised the subject of providing the Man-
chester bomb inquiry with a witness
statement.
It was a marked difference in attitude
towards him, his friend claimed, since
two months earlier the mosque had been
planning to expand his Sharia depart-
ment.
Meanwhile, the stalking and harass-
ment El-Saeiti was experiencing became
increasingly intense, ultimately forcing
him to make the decision to move.
“People like that are unpredictable,”
the friend said. “He has to leave Man-
chester, a city that he loves. He has to do
it because it’s not safe for him here.”
The Didsbury area, filled with cafés,
independent shops and restaurants, is
popular with students and young profes-
sionals including BBC staff.
El-Saeiti was born in Benghazi in
Libya. The son of a diplomat, he holds a
degree in Islamic studies from the Uni-
versity of Madinah in Saudi Arabia, and
gained a master’s degree in theology
from Middlesex University after arriving
JOEL GOODMAN/LNP; GMP/PA
in the UK as an asylum seeker. He was
given indefinite leave to remain in the UK
in 2009 and was employed for more than
ten years by Didsbury mosque.
In April 2016, after the rise of Isis, anti-
terrorism police in Manchester tried to
engage with a number of mosques in the
south Manchester area in order to get
imams to discourage young men from
going abroad to fight in Syria.
The response of Didsbury mosque to
engagement was “less positive” than
other mosques, according to Detective
Chief Superintendent Dominic Scally,
the head of Counter Terrorism Policing
North West.
He told the inquiry: “The other
mosques responded to police contact in
a more positive fashion. In particular, we
had more frequent contact with the
other mosques and contact with a
broader range of more senior members
of those mosques.”
Richard Scorer, head of abuse law and
public inquiries at the law firm Slater and
Gordon, who represented the families of
12 of the victims of the Manchester Arena
bombing, said: “While we do not allege
that the mosque was directly involved in
Salman Abedi’s radicalisation, we are dis-
mayed at the mosque’s failure to do all it
could to combat and prevent radicalisa-
tion within its community.
“We urge the inquiry to refer Didsbury
Mosque/Manchester Islamic Centre to
the Charity Commission so that its chari-
table status can be reviewed.”
In a statement, Didsbury mosque said
it had been a victim of “smearing and
demonisation by some at the inquiry and
in the media”. It mentioned an arson
attack at the mosque in September,
which was investigated by police as a
hate crime.
“We became aware of discussions on
social media about ‘a solution’ to the
problem of Didsbury mosque, namely, to
blow it up,” the spokesman said. “We
made it clear that this barbaric act [the
Manchester bombing] had nothing to do
with Didsbury mosque, Islam, or the
Quran immediately after the attack.”
A Didsbury mosque trustee also gave
evidence to the inquiry claiming El-Saeiti
had a “grudge” against the trustees and
had lied about the mosque in his evi-
dence.
The inquiry heard from trustees that
Didsbury mosque was a “middle-of-the-
road mosque”, rather than a Salafist
mosque, a version of Islam adopted by
Isis.
Police are yet to make arrests in rela-
tion to the three men suspected of stalk-
ing El-Saeiti but are in possession of
CCTV imagery of them.
In relation to allegations of social
media threats, a Counter Terror Police
North West spokeswoman said: “A file is
with the Crown Prosecution Service
awaiting a decision.”Work dried up after Dirty Dancing but
the nose job is what killed my career
Having shot to fame in Dirty
Dancing as Baby Houseman,
Jennifer Grey expected the
offers for acting roles to come
pouring in. Instead, it was a
trickle — and the only parts
she was asked to play were
Jewish characters.
So the actress, who is
Jewish, “did the thing I’d been
resisting for a good part of my
life. I went for a nose job.” But
the plan backfired, with two
botched operations leaving
her unrecognisable and
turning her into a cautionary
tale of Hollywood vanity.
Grey was 27 when Dirty
Dancing, the hit film in which
she starred with Patrick
Swayze as a woman who falls
in love with a holiday camp
dance instructor, was
released in 1987. That profile
boost did not translate into
extra work, however.
In her memoir, Out of the
Corner, to be published by
Ballantine on Tuesday, Grey,
now 62, recalled meeting a
plastic surgeon for the first
time. She writes: “Right out of
the gate I wanted to be clear
about what I had come for.
‘The only reason I’m even in
your office is because I need
to broaden my range so I can
get work. So that I can,
hopefully, someday be cast as
something other than a Jew.’ ”
The surgeon built her a
new nose tip and the plan
worked, at first. She was castas the female lead in Wind, a
big-budget tale of the first
woman to sail in the
America’s Cup. Yet after six
months shooting in the sun
she became tanned, and a
piece of white cartilage could
be seen protruding from the
end of her nose.
A second operation was
even less successful. When
Grey’s bandages were
removed, “the way the nose
was oriented on my face was
all wrong”. She saw “twin
unfamiliar holes” in a nose
that “looked truncated”.
A few weeks later, Grey
attended a red-carpet event,
her first since Dirty Dancing
was released, but none of the
paparazzi recognised her.
Nor did the actor Michael
Douglas, who had recently sat
beside her on a 10-hour flight
from London to Los Angeles.
Her father, the actor Joel
Grey, thought it best, she
wrote, “if you just didn’t go
out in public for a while”.
Grey wrote: “In the world’s
eyes, I was no longer me. I
had unwittingly joined the
witness protection program.”
She was then called to shoot
additional scenes for Wind
but filming was a farce as a
result of her radically altered
look. The director, Caroll
Ballard, blamed Grey’s nose
job for the film being a
commercial and critical flop.
In her memoir she also lifts
the lid on tensions with her
Dirty Dancing co-star, Patrick
Swayze, who had “issues with
the script” including resisting
saying the famous line
“Nobody puts Baby in the
corner”. Swayze died of
pancreatic cancer in 2009.
She describes her
relationship with Matthew
Broderick, her co-star in
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, as
“toxic”, and recounts her
whirlwind romance and
engagement with Johnny
Depp. A sequel to Dirty
Dancing starring Grey was
confirmed last week.
Culture, pages 8-Liam Kelly
Arts CorrespondentJennifer Grey in the 1980s, before the surgery she felt she had to have, as she writes in
her memoirs, to “hopefully be cast as something other than a Jew”. Right, Grey in 2018ALAMY