Official: Westminster jihadi DID view web terror videos before attack
‘Serious issues’
THE Westminster Bridge terrorist watched jihadist propaganda on YouTube three days before the atrocity, it emerged yesterday.
Tech giants are again under fire after it was revealed Khalid Masood browsed Google’s video platform for terror videos, including suicide attacks, before launching his car and knife rampage on March 22.
Yesterday, in a victory for the Daily Mail, YouTube finally admitted it was facing ‘serious issues’ over protecting vulnerable young people from watching vile material.
And Google has been forced to hire significantly more workers to comb through its content so shocking and inappropriate material – including extremist videos – can be deleted. By next year the number of employees will hit 10,000.
A row over the responsibilities of social media and internet firms flared up after Islamic Stateinspired fanatic Masood murdered five – including PC Keith Palmer – and injured more than 50 in an attack outside Parliament. The following day, the Mail revealed that vile terror handbooks encouraging jihadis to mount a car attack before going on a stabbing rampage – the method used by the killer – were available online. There was also anger that encrypted messaging services such as WhatsApp were refusing to help security services decode communications. Masood used the app three minutes before embarking on the slaughter.
Details of his attack were published in an internal review of the police and MI5’ s handling of the four terrorist attacks to strike Britain this year.
The 52-year- old was known to police and MI5 for association with extremists but he was a ‘closed’ subject of interest at the time of the atrocity, meaning he was no longer under active investigation.
The report, by the Government’s former terror watchdog David Anderson QC, said: ‘No intelligence was being gathered on him, and neiby
ther MI5 nor the police had any reason to anticipate the attack.’
Born Adrian Russell Elms in 1964, he grew up in Kent and changed his name to Khalid Masood in 2005, having converted to Islam while in prison five years earlier.
Before the attack, both the police and MI5 had some limited – and largely historic – knowledge of Masood.
He was convicted seven times between 1983 and 2003 for offences ranging from criminal damage to assault occasioning actual bodily harm, assault on police and unlawful wounding.
Masood appeared on MI5’s radar in April 2004 when a telephone number linked to him was seen in the contacts list of a terrorist suspect over plans to detonate bombs in the UK.
In 2009, spies believed he could be an individual in Saudi Arabia who was helping jihadis travel to an Al Qaeda stronghold in Pakistan for terror training.
Even though it turned out that he was not that individual, Masood was placed under active investigation as a ‘subject of interest’ between February 2010 and October 2012 while security chiefs assessed whether he posed a threat.
From then until 2016, he associated with extremists linked to the banned terrorist group AlMuhajiroun, but this was not sufficient to warrant re-opening an investigation into him. The Anderson report also reveals how, in the days before his attack, Masood conducted reconnaissance of Westminster Bridge in person and online, and browsed YouTube for terror videos.
In the Commons yesterday. Home Secretary Amber Rudd called on web giants to do more to take down extremism, including when jihadis look at how to buy bombs. She said Google should ‘ invest in machine learning and artificial intelligence so material is taken down before it is seen’.
In a briefing in London, Mr Anderson questioned whether technology giants had ‘gone far enough’ to remove extremist content from websites.
He said: ‘If you use Google’s search function for the Islamic State magazine you will find on the first page of your search a pictorial description of how best to use a knife to kill somebody, and how best to use a truck to mow somebody down.
‘You could say a determined person is going to track that down anyhow but does it really have to be the first page of your search results?’
Google yesterday apologised for some of the grotesque content on its YouTube Kids platform. Spokesman Malik Ducard admitted the video platform was ‘facing serious issues’.
‘I know that in light of the news stories that we’ve all seen in recent weeks, YouTube has more to do to fulfil [its] mission,’ he said.
‘The complex threats that we face today are evolving and sophisticated… still, the complexity of these issues is no excuse and we are deeply sorry. I can’t emphasise enough how seriously we take the issue of child safety across all of YouTube.’