SCUMBAG No.3 IS NAMED BY COPS Not on our radar, says MI5
THE third London Bridge terrorist has been named as Youssef Zaghba, an Italian national of Moroccan descent, as security services prepared to launch a review into the atrocity.
Zaghba, 22, was reported to have been stopped at Bologna’s airport trying to fly to Turkey in March 2016, allegedly on his way to Syria.
Italian authorities put him on a watch list and flagged his presence to Moroccan and British counterparts, according to the Corriere della Sera newspaper.
However, Scotland Yard said Zaghba, who was living in east London and reportedly worked in a restaurant in the capital, was not a police or MI5 “subject of interest”.
His identity was confirmed as counter-terror agencies faced intense scrutiny after it emerged another member of the terror gang, Khuram Shazad Butt, 27, had been known to authorities.
Butt was investigated by officers in 2015 but they found no evidence he was planning an attack and he was “prioritised in the lower echelons of our investigative work”, police said.
Reviewing
The disclosure means perpetrators in all three of the terrorist outrages to hit Britain this year had at some point appeared on security agencies’ radar.
During a visit to Bangor, North Wales, Theresa May said a review had been launched after the Manchester bombing last month and she expected the same process to be launched following Saturday’s rampage at the capital’s famous Borough Market in Southwark.
The Prime Minister told Sky News: “MI5 and the police have already said they would be reviewing how they dealt with Manchester and I would expect them to do exactly the same in relation to London Bridge.”
Butt, a father-of-two who appeared on Channel 4 documentary The Jihadis Next Door, was also reported to the anti-terror hotline in 2015 for showing signs of “extremism or radicalisation”.
Former anti-terror laws watchdog Lord Carlile said: “I feel a sense of disappointment this morning that the perpetrator Butt slipped off the radar.
“In my view, we need to review what happened in his case, and learn the lessons so that the methodology of the response to known suspicions is improved.”
Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson acknowledged authorities will face questions.
He told Sky News: “People are going to say ‘How on earth could we have let this guy or possibly more through the net?” In other developments: Detectives arrested a 27-year-old man under the Terrorism Act at an address in Barking, east London, bringing the total number held as part of the investigation to 13, with 12 released without charge.
Intensive inquiries are being mounted to establish how the three men knew each other, with police appealing for anyone with information to contact them.
A minute’s silence was observed nationwide at 11am on Tuesday in memory of the victims of the attack.