London’s High Court has heard how the 2017 bombing of the Manchester Arena devastated the lives of a father and daughter who were severely injured in the attack.
The father, Martin Hibbert, is in court this week pursuing legal action against a conspiracy theorist called Richard Hall, who claims that the bombing was faked by government agencies using “crisis actors”.
Hall has made several videos and written a book in which he claims that the terrorist attack was an “elaborate hoax” instigated by government agencies, and that no one was actually killed or injured as a result of the bombing.
Speaking for the Hibberts, lawyer Jonathan Price told the court that his clients were standing very close to terrorist Salman Abedi when he detonated a homemade rucksack bomb in the middle of a crowd of concert-goers at the end of an Ariana Grande show in May 2017.
According to the BBC, he said that the attack impacted on the father and daughter “in every conceivable way”, resulting in “life-changing injuries from which they will never recover”.
Martin was left with a spinal cord injury while his daughter Eve suffered severe brain damage. In the immediate aftermath of the bomb being detonated, Price explained, “Martin, paralysed, saw Eve lying next to him and assumed he was watching her die, unable to help. He saw others lying dead or injured around him”.
Hall has targeted the Hibberts specifically when promoting his conspiracy theory, claiming that Eve was disabled before the attack and that “her parents are invoking their daughter’s catastrophic disability as part of a huge fraud on the general public”.
While trying to gather evidence to back up his conspiracy theory, Hall secretly filmed Eve and her mother from the street outside their home.
The Hibberts have sued Hall over alleged harassment, misuse of private information and breaches of data protection laws. Earlier this year the judge overseeing the case, Richard Davison, ruled that Hall would not be allowed to try to defend his actual conspiracy theory in court, and instead would have to focus on the specifics of the harassment, privacy and data claims, and/or seek to argue that his actions are protected by his right to free speech.
At an initial hearing, Hall told Davidson that there was no “first-hand tangible evidence” - such as CCTV footage or photographs - to prove that the Hibberts were at the arena or were hurt as a result of the bombing. He then claimed that other survivors had lied about their injuries and that photos of victims taken near the venue on the night of the attack featured people who had “agreed to take part in an exercise”.
Dismissing those claims outright, Davidson said that, while Hall’s “beliefs may be genuinely held, his theory that the Manchester bombing was an operation staged by government agencies in which no one was genuinely killed or injured is absurd and fantastical”.
Regarding Hall’s claims about the Hibberts, the judge said, it was “simply preposterous” to maintain that the father and daughter “were not there and were either not severely injured at all or acquired their injuries earlier and by a different mechanism than the bombing”.
The lawyer representing Hall, Paul Oakley, has set out his client’s remaining case in a written submission to the court. He said that Hall’s views, “however unpleasant”, were protected by his client’s right to freedom of expression. And while Hall had filmed Eve and her mother, this was done from a public highway and the footage was never published. As a result, this “single incident would not be sufficient” to make a legal claim under harassment and privacy laws.
He added that Martin had made the “positive choice” to cooperate with the media following the terrorist attack, putting his circumstances into the public domain. Oakley has also told the court that Hall is willing to amend his position regarding the circumstances of the attack “if he is made aware of evidence” that disproves his conspiracy theory.
The trial continues.
