‘UK hate preachers made my son a terrorist’

London Bridge killer was radicalised in the West by ‘criminals’ who exploited him, says Moroccan father

THE father of Youssef Zaghba, the London Bridge killer, has blamed the West for his son’s radicalisation, saying young Muslims are being “exploited” by British hate preachers.

Speaking at his home in Fez, northern Morocco, Mohammed Zaghba claimed his son was a “decent young man” until he fell into the company of violent Islamists in east London.

He told The Sunday Telegraph: “The West is exploiting Muslim youth. There are criminals out there who are manipulating young men into doing these dreadful things, and most of them seem to be in the West, not here.”

However, the inquests into the deaths of those killed at London Bridge heard Mr Zaghba may have shaped his son’s outlook years earlier, when he shouted: “Allahu akbar” as television broadcast the 9/11 attacks on the US.

Mr Zaghba made his comments in a brief interview at the doorstep of his flat in Fez in the days immediately after the London Bridge attacks.

He was then forced to end the conversation by a group of men believed to be Moroccan security police.

Since then, he has declined further interviews. Today, this newspaper is disclosing his full comments from his original interview for the first time.

Mr Zaghba, 55, said he believed his son fell under bad influences while working at a London restaurant – believed to be Franzos, next to the gym where he met accomplices Khuram Butt, 27, and Rachid Redouane, 30.

“My son spent most of his life here in Morocco, and he was a good person with a good education,” Mr Zaghba said. “Everyone knew him as a good young man.

“But he changed while he was working at that restaurant, where he met some people and started to be radicalised. What exactly happened there, I have no idea. If I knew, I wouldn’t have let my son go near those people.”

During the inquests, Wayne Jolley, the acting detective chief inspector who helped lead Scotland Yard’s investigation into the attacks, told the Old Bailey that 22-year-old Zaghba’s mother had written about her husband’s response to the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

He said: “She remembers how every time an image of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center appeared on the screen her husband would shout, ‘Allahu akbar.’ Zaghba was six.”

Jonathan Hough QC, counsel to the inquests, replied: “So some evidence of what we would think of as extremist views within the household?”

Zaghba and his sister Kaouthar moved to Italy with their Italian-born mother, Valeria Collina, after her marriage to Mr Zaghba broke down.

Zaghba moved to London in 2015. In March 2016, he was stopped at an Italian airport on suspicion of trying to go to fight in Syria and told officials: “I’m going to be a terrorist.”

Despite Italian police alerting Britain, a request for further information was lost in MI5’s filing system and he was not added to a terror watch list.

Mr Zaghba said that in the months before the attack, his son worked at Eman TV, a London Muslim channel.

He said he only learned of what had happened at London Bridge two days later when he received a phone call from his daughter in Italy to say that his son had been involved.

“How is it possible to describe how you feel after something like this?” he added. “It is impossible.”