Profiles emerge of three U.K. attackers
A chef, a clerk and ‘suspicious’ Italian
LONDON • Details emerged Tuesday of the three London Bridge attackers: a Pakistanborn failed customer service clerk with links to one of Europe’s most prolific hate preachers, a Moroccan pastry chef whose partner said he once went swimming rather than see his daughter and an Italian man who told authorities he “wanted to be a terrorist.”
At least two of the men were known to British intelligence and law enforcement officials, raising questions about whether anything could have been done to stop the attack, which began Saturday when the men drove a rented van into a crowd and then leaped out to stab people who crossed their paths. Seven were killed and nearly 50 wounded. All three of the attackers were shot dead by police.
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said it was fair to ask how the attackers “slipped through our net.”
Security has become a key issue in the run-up to Thursday’s general election. British security officials said none of the men was considered violent, but they acknowledged the difficulty of predicting whether extremists will turn dangerous. The assault was the third attack in three months in which most of the assailants had been on authorities’ radar at some point.
As the investigation expanded to look at how the men knew one another and whether they were part of a larger conspiracy, Pakistani intelligence authorities swooped Tuesday into the town of Jhelum, where Khuram Butt lived until the time he was seven, when he moved to Britain. His cousin, 18-year-old Bilal Dar, said Butt’s uncle was taken in for questioning.
“Our family is hurt by what he did,” Dar said in the town about two hours east of Pakistan’s capital. “This has destroyed our family’s pride.”
Butt, 27, embraced radical Islam during his time in London and was once filmed in a documentary called The Jihadis Next Door. In the film, he was seen with a group unfurling a black-and-white flag associated with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The men were followers of Anjem Choudary, a preacher who was jailed for his support of ISIL and who once praised the 9/11 attackers.
During his time in Britain, Butt once worked for Transport of London as a customer service clerk but failed his probation. He also worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken and used a gym in east London. In his spare time, he tried to recruit followers to ISIL — a practice that prompted a neighbour to report him to the police in 2015.
He was one of about 3,000 suspects who were known to British authorities but not part of 500 active investigations.
Police identified the second attacker as 30-yearold Rachid Redouane, also known as Rachid Elkhdar, who claimed to have both Moroccan and Libyan roots and worked as a pastry chef in Ireland, where he had lived in the past five years as well the east London suburb of Dagenham.
He married a British woman named Charisse O’Leary, who posted on Facebook last month that Redouane was negligent in seeing their young daughter and on one planned visit, she said he told her: “I’m going swimming.” The couple is thought to have split. O’Leary was one of 13 people arrested after Saturday’s attacks. Twelve were later released. One man is still being held.
Redouane was never under surveillance by Irish authorities.
The third attacker was identified as Youssef Zaghba, a 22-year-old Italian national of Moroccan descent who was reportedly working in a London restaurant.
An Italian prosecutor says Zaghba told authorities after being stopped last year at Bologna’s airport that he “wanted to be a terrorist,” but then quickly corrected himself. There was not enough evidence to arrest or charge Zaghba when authorities questioned him at the Marconi airport on March 15, 2016, Bologna prosecutor Giuseppe Amato said Tuesday. Amato told Italy’s Radio 24 that Zaghba was flagged to British authorities as a “possible suspect.”
Zaghba was stopped while trying to take a flight to Turkey on his way to Syria, Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported Tuesday.
After that, Amato said, any time Zaghba was in Italy, he was always tracked by Italian intelligence officers.
“We did everything we could have done,” he said. “But there weren’t elements of proof that he was a terrorist. He was someone who was suspicious because of his way of behaving.”
His mother said her son wanted to go to Syria “because it was a place where you could live according to a pure Islam.”
OUR FAMILY IS HURT BY WHAT HE DID. THIS HAS DESTROYED OUR FAMILY’S PRIDE.