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A Northern Territory father who was at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester with his daughter says their decision to stay back waiting for a possible encore may have saved their lives.
David Black, from Palmerston south of Darwin, was at the show with his 12-year-old daughter Peta when a suicide bomber detonated a home-made explosive device near the stadium, killing 22 people, including children.
Earlier, authorities named the suspected bomber as Salman Abedi, a 22-year-old who was born in Manchester to parents of Libyan origin.
Speaking on Darwin radio station Mix104.9, Mr Black said he was waiting to see if Grande would perform an encore when he saw a commotion below.
"We heard a bit of a bang go off and because we were ... at the top of the stadium, we saw everybody running in different directions," he said.
"I thought it was a crushing situation so I got Peta [my daughter] to walk over to empty seats and sit down.
"I told her we should sit down for a minute and actually see what was going on."
He said he was one of the last people to leave the stadium.
"As we got halfway down, we were heading towards the Victoria Station exit, which is where it went off, so that's when I could smell smoke and stuff like that and realised that something happened," he said.
The identities of the victims are slowly becoming known.
They include an eight-year-old girl, two teenage girls and a 28-year-old man.
Mr Black and his daughter were uninjured but said their decision to hang back was what saved them.
"If it had been another 10 minutes earlier we would have been right near where it was," he said.
"We were very lucky, it's the old Darwin way where we weren't in a rush to leave," he said.
Topics: terrorism, music, united-kingdom, palmerston-0830
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