Former hotel entertainer who plotted deadly gun attack

A decade before he began plotting a mass killing spree targeting Jewish people on the streets of Manchester, Walid Saadaoui was working as a hotel entertainer in Tunisia.

By day he joined guests, mainly Western tourists, in pool sessions of aerobics and water polo, while at night he helped stage dance shows and quizzes.

Now, Saadaoui has been jailed for 37 years for planning a gun attack to cause "untold harm" to the Jewish community.

The plot "could potentially have been the deadliest terrorist attack in UK history" according to police.

While working in the Tunisian coastal resort of Sousse, Saadaoui started a relationship with an English holidaymaker named Jane.

He told his trial at Preston Crown Court they lived in his home country for a year and got married before they decided to move to the UK in 2012.

Saadaoui successfully applied for a work visa and the couple moved to Clacton-on Sea, Essex, where he worked in the town's Haven Holiday Village and was employed in its shops, bakery and arcade.

He said he saved money by working extra hours at the site for six years.

In April 2018 he bought The Albatross restaurant in Regent Road, Great Yarmouth, with the assistance of a bank loan.

He told jurors: "I wanted to progress in life. I wanted to be my own boss."

His marriage had already finished earlier that year, he said, and he later met his second wife, Michelle, who was already working at the Italian restaurant.

They went on to have two children.

Saadaoui said The Albatross, which had been established for 17 years by the previous owner, was a "successful business with a good customer base" where he regularly hosted wedding ceremonies and birthday parties.

In 2023, he sold the restaurant and home as his family moved to a house in Wigan, Greater Manchester, which he bought in cash.

In July and August of that year, he emptied his bank account with multiple withdrawals.

Following his arrest in May 2024, police found £75,000 in a safe hidden in a brick outhouse in the rear garden of his home in Crankwood Road.

Saadaoui had also finalised his will and travelled to see his mother in Tunisia earlier that year, Preston Crown Court heard.

He never worked during his time in Wigan, but said he had plans to set up a beekeeping business.

But prosecutors said Saadaoui moved to Greater Manchester with the sole intention of ramping up his plans for martyrdom in an attack aimed at Jews in the region.

Saadoui, born in Gaafour, in north-western Tunisia, was about four when his family moved to Sousse, which is near to the scene of a 2015 gun attack in Port El Kantaoui.

A gunman targeting a hotel killed 38 people, including 30 Britons.

The 38-year-old, who is understood to hold UK citizenship, was convicted of preparing acts of terrorism between December 2023 and May 2024 alongside Amar Hussein.

Amar Husein has been sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 26 years.

Saadoui's brother Bilel, 36, was found guilty of failing to disclose information about the plans and has been jailed for six years.

Bilel Saadoui also worked in a hotel in Sousse and he too went on to marry an English tourist, a widowed hairdresser on holiday with her two young children.

They met in 2010 and started a relationship a year later before getting married in November 2014 and moving to Hindley, Wigan.

Since 2020 he had worked as a casual worker at Pound Bargains in Market Street, Hindley.

Walid Saadaoui came to the attention of the authorities when he used 10 Facebook accounts, none of which were in his own name, to spread a torrent of Islamist extremist views.

An undercover operative - known as Farouk - was deployed to gain his trust online and later in person.

• How gun plot targeting Jewish community was stopped

Walid Saadaoui used one of his fake accounts to join the Facebook group of the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester, which contained details of a "March Against Antisemitism" held in the city centre on 21 January 2025, which was attended by thousands of people.

Days later he told Farouk: "Here in Manchester, we have the biggest Jewish community.

"God willing we will degrade and humiliate them (in the worst way possible), and hit them where it hurts."

He recruited fellow IS sympathiser Hussein, a Kuwaiti national, who worked and lived at a furniture shop in Bolton, Greater Manchester, to assist his plans.

The pair travelled to Dover, Kent, in March 2024 to conduct hostile reconnaissance on how a weapon could be smuggled through the port without detection.

On his return, Walid Saadaoui travelled to Prestwich and Higher Broughton in north Manchester where he carried out similar surveillance on Jewish nurseries, schools, synagogues and shops.

His brother, of Hindley, Wigan, was not planning to take part in the attacks but knew what his older brother was doing and sympathised with the views of the so-called Islamic State group.

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