Khalid Masood: the making of a killer
Last Tuesday, Khalid Masood checked into the £59-a-night Preston Park Hotel in Brighton. Staff found him to be friendly, jovial and chatty, said The Daily Telegraph; he had a kebab for dinner, and the next morning he told them that he was “off to London today”, as though he were going sightseeing. Hours later, he drove his rented Hyundai 4x4 across Westminster Bridge at speeds of up to 76mph, and – mounting the pavement – ploughed into dozens of pedestrians. Three were killed: Aysha Frade, 43, who worked at a local sixth-form college, US tourist Kurt Cochran, 54, and retired window cleaner Leslie Rhodes, 75. Many more sustained horrific injuries. Seconds later, Masood crashed his car into the gates of Parliament, and jumped out and stabbed PC Keith Palmer to death, before police shot Masood dead, bringing an end to the worst terrorist attack on British soil since 2005.
“Almost immediately, an impossible task began,” said the FT: “trying to read a dead man’s mind.” As in the aftermath of similar attacks, a desperation to understand the motives of the killer led “to a frantic trawl of what scraps of biographical detail could be found”. Inevitably, these did not add up to a “clear portrait”. However, elements in his background chime with those of other Europeans who have turned to jihad – including long spells of delinquency, and jail time.
Born Adrian Elms, in Kent, to a white mother and a black father, he grew up in Tunbridge Wells with his mother and stepfather. As possibly its only black pupil, he was known at school as Black Ade. Even so, contemporaries claim there was little racism, and that he was popular and happy. But in his teens, he began to drink and smoke cannabis. He was charged with the first in a string of offences at 19; he became estranged from his family (who later moved to rural Wales), and spent his 20s taking and dealing drugs. By the early 1990s, he had ostensibly settled down: he’d married a businesswoman named Jane Harvey; they had two daughters, and moved to a village in Sussex. Yet it seems an anger was boiling under the surface: there were rumours of uncontrolled rages. Then, in 2000, during a fight triggered (allegedly) by a racist slur, he slashed a man across the face. “I just want blood, I dream about killing someone,” he reportedly told a friend. He spent two years in jail. On his release, he moved to Eastbourne, where a former landlady described him as a cracksmoking “madman”. In 2003, he cut another man’s face, and spent another year in jail. He then married a young Muslim woman, but it didn’t last; her relatives said he was violent and seemed “psychopathic”. After that, though, he lived more quietly. He spent time in Saudi Arabia, teaching English (he claimed), and lived with his new partner in Luton and then Birmingham. Both are known as centres of jihadi activity, but although he may have been on MI5’S radar some years ago, his name seems never to have appeared among the 3,000 on its list of “subjects of interest”. Recent neighbours described him as devout, law-abiding and polite.
It’s unclear when Masood was radicalised, but chances are it wasn’t in a mosque, said James Harkin in the Daily Mail. More likely, he came into contact with “one of the tiny Islamist sects which fester in this country” – outfits that feed on a “reservoir of embittered boredom in our inner cities, and prey on broken, lost, often disturbed men who are in need of an identity”. At 52, he was older than most Islamist terrorists, said Jason Burke in The Observer. But in other ways, he was not untypical. Around 12% of “homegrown jihadists” over the past ten years have, like Masood, been converts to Islam. Perhaps converts feel they have more to prove, or, with less grounding in their faith, are more susceptible to extremist interpretations of its texts. And a growing proportion have criminal records. One reason for this is that unlike the ascetic al-qa’eda, Isis “offers adventure, camaraderie, violence, cash rewards and even sexual opportunity”. In short, to troubled young men, it offers much of what the gang does – a sense of belonging, purpose and status – only with redemption thrown in: recruits are encouraged to believe that by committing to jihad, they’ll wash away their sins.
Yet we don’t know that Masood was even involved with Isis, said Kenan Malik in the same paper. It claimed responsibility for the attack, but its “soldiers” often turn out to be unbalanced individuals, with only tenuous links to the group, who are driven not by real ideology, but by “a sense of inchoate, personal rage”. In interpreting such attacks, we must try to draw “a distinction between jihadi violence and the fury of disturbed minds”.
“His background chimes with others who have turned to jihad – long spells of delinquency, and jail time”