Questions raised over how killer escaped MI5’ s radar
It is not an exact science assessing which extremists pose the greatest threat.
Police officers responded to the attack on Parliament with the utmost professionalism, as they have trained intensively for such situations. Keith Palmer did his duty and the Met can be proud of the calm way he and the force responded.
Imagine for a moment what police officers would have been thinking as they put their uniforms on yesterday, knowing that a friend and colleague had been murdered just the day before.
It is a time to stop and reflect upon the bravery of our police and to support the men and women who put themselves in harms way to keep us all safe.
The vast majority, such as Palmer, are unarmed. When confronted by a man with a knife, they are trained to The terrorist who murdered four people in Westminster was investigated by MI5 for “violent extremism” but was ruled out as a threat by security services before possibly being “re- radicalised”.
Khalid Masood, 52, was named by Scotland Yard as the Isisinspired extremist who was shot dead inside the gates of Parliament on Thursday, as eight suspected associates were arrested in raids in London and Birmingham. Yesterday it emerged that Masood was born Adrian Elms in Kent and is thought to have been radicalised in prison.
In 2000, he was jailed for slashing a man across the face in an argument which had “racial overtones”.
He was charged in 2003 with grievous bodily harm, when aged 39, after being accused of stabbing a 22- year- old man in the nose in an incident in Eastbourne. The victim was left with serious facial injuries and needing cosmetic surgery. Elms, who was living in the Sussex seaside town at the time, was also facing two charges of possessing an offensive weapon, namely a knife and a baton, and is understood to have been jailed for the offences.
Police and the security services now face serious questions about what they previously knew about the British Muslim convert. Apparently anticipating criticism, Prime Minister Theresa May announced in the Commons that Masood was known to MI5 but insisted he was a “peripheral figure” in an investigation “some years ago” and was “not part of the current intelligence picture”.
Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, also mounted a pre- run towards the threat, not away. They have to put their lives at risk so others in Parliament can go about theirs freely.
The focus of the investigation by the Counter Terrorism Command ( known as SO15) will continue to be about ensuring that other terrorists are not planning to carry out followup attacks.
More arrests and searches may emptive defence of the security services, saying “be careful before we point any finger of blame at the intelligence services” as she suggested that “we’ll discover more about this particular man and the people around him”. She added: “The fact that he was known to them doesn’t mean that somebody has 24- hour cover.” Scotland Yard also volunteered that it had “no prior intelligence about his intent to mount a terrorist attack”. The force follow those carried out since Thursday.
Very few terrorists operate entirely alone; it will be surprising if there were not others who were at least aware of an intention to carry out an attack.
All terrorists live in communities and someone will probably have known something about this attack. Digital forensic experts will scrutinise later admitted that Khalid Masood was an alias and not the terrorist’s birth name, without providing his true identity.
Scotland Yard insisted that while Masood had previous convictions spanning 20 years, he had never been convicted of a terrorist offence.
Scotland Yard held back key information about Masood. He was born in Kent on Christmas Day 1964 under a different name before phones and other devices, searching for clues of associates and contact with known terrorists overseas. CCTV footage from across London will be seized and scrutinised to track the journeys of the suspect’s vehicle in the past few weeks and months. The intelligence agencies will trawl through their databases looking for links to this now- reactive police investigation. changing it by deed poll, but the authorities had refused to release his birth name.
Julian King, the European Union commissioner for security, raised the possibility Masood had become re- radicalised, making him “incredibly hard” to stop.
He said extremists who dropped off terrorist watch lists as their perceived threat declined could become radicalised again and commit an attack without “plugging
Critics will conveniently forget that at least 13 terrorist attacks have been stopped in the past few years with scores of suspects convicted of serious terrorist offences.
They will not consider in context the 18 attacks that have taken place in France over the past past two years, the five in Germany and the five in Belgium with the loss of hundreds of lives. in” to a wider terrorist network.
His comments suggest that Masood may have become known to MI5 when al- Qaeda was the main terrorist threat, before switching his allegiance to Isis.
Masood had been “hanging out” with would- be jihadists who wanted to travel to fight abroad, a United States Government source said.
There was no indication Masood had himself gone abroad to fight.
We should acknowledge that despite everything that happened in Westminster two days ago, London remains one of the safest capital cities in Europe. Richard Walton was the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command ( SO15) head and is now a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute
Aysha Frade, a British citizen whose mother is Spanish, was one of two people killed on Westminster Bridge.
In the northwestern Spanish town of Betanzos, where her mother was born and her two sisters run an English- language school, the mayor said: “The whole town is shocked.”
Although Frade, 43, was born and lived in London, she spent weeks every summer in Betanzos visiting relatives, said Ramon Garcia Vazquez, mayor of the town of 13,000 in Spain’s Galicia region.
Frade worked as an administrator at the DLD College — a school in Westminster a stone’s throw from Parliament.
Frade had two daughters, Spain’s regional Voz de Galicia newspaper reported.
Kurt Cochran from Utah was on the last day of a European trip celebrating his 25th wedding anniversary when he was killed on Westminster Bridge.
His wife, Melissa, was seriously injured and was still in hospital last night. She suffered a broken leg, a broken rib and cuts and bruises, said friend Mike Murphy.
They were visiting her parents, who are serving as Mormon missionaries in the British capital, a church spokesman said.
The couple ran a recording studio in the basement of their home just outside Salt Lake City.
The fourth victim of Thursday's attack died yesterday, London police said, without releasing his name or nationality.
The 75- year- old man had been receiving medical treatment in the hospital after the attack and life support was withdrawn yesterday, a police statement said.
Those injured in the attack included 12 Britons, four South Koreans, three French, two Romanians, two Greeks, two Irish, and one person each from Germany, Poland, China, Italy, Portugal and the US. Police earlier said several people were in critical condition.