Warnings were ample about London attackers
Red flags had been raised repeatedly about three men.
Britons are questioning why three people who prompted repeated red flags were not stopped.
Islamic State propaganda had been found in the bag of one attacker while he was trying to board a flight in Italy. An FBI informant said he had raised alarms about the second attacker two years ago. The third attacker, denied asylum in Britain, appeared to have sneaked in from Ireland.
The warning signs about the three assailants in a white van who smashed and stabbed their way through a trendy London neighbor- hood tumbled into the open this week, compounding the pressure on the police and Prime Minister Theresa May to explain them.
What has become clear since the Saturday night assault is that again and again, the young men who killed seven people before they were shot to death by the police had been reported to law enforcement authorities, bumping into what should have been the country’s security net, only for those signals to be played down, ignored or missed.
The latest revelat ions have placed May, a former home secretary who was in charge of counterterrorism for six years before taking over as prime minister last year, under intense scrutiny ahead of today’s general election. Even her own foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, a former London mayor, voiced the question many here are asking.
“How on earth could we have let this guy or possi- bly more through the net — what happened?” he asked in an interview on Sky News.
Some of the missed warn- ings were especially glaring because they came from the very people the British government had entrusted with identifying extremists.
Usama Hasan, a former Islamic extremist who works with the police to help de-radicalize others, said he had a physical alterca- tion in a London park less than a year ago with one of the assailants, Khuram Butt.
Butt’s brother, Saad, who did paid work for the police on counterextremism issues and was estranged from the assailant, missed signs of how dangerous his broth- er’s extremism had become.
Other warnings had also been raised about Khuram Butt, 27, who held odd jobs, including at KFC and a sixmonth stint as a customer service trainee for the London subway system that ended in October. His second child was born weeks before the attack, neighbors said.
In 2015, an FBI informant, Jesse Morton, wrote a report to his handler in the United States, identifying Butt as a person to watch because of what Morton described as his rising role in extremist chat rooms run by Al Muhajiroun, an organization banned in Britain because of its sprawl- ing links to terrorism.
“My handler got back to me and said it was ‘excel- lent work’ and forwarded it to the head office,” said Morton, a former al-Qaida recruiter from New York who served prison time on terrorism charges before recanting and agreeing to work undercover.
Morton, who recently started Parallel Networks, an organization combat- ing extremism, said it was unclear to him whether his FBI report had been forwarded to British officials. A spokesman for the FBI, Andrew C. Ames, said the agency had no comment.
Meanwhile, in Italy, authorities allowed the second attacker, Youssef Zaghba, to walk past them last year at an airport security check, even though he was carrying Islamic State propaganda. Zaghba, 22, an Italian of Moroccan descent, was en route to Syria to fight for the Islamic State when he was stopped in March at the airport in Bologna. He was traveling on a one-way ticket, and the authorities found Islamic State mate- rial on one of his electronic devices, said two former European intelligence offi- cials, who spoke on the con- dition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.
Giuseppe Amato, the chief prosecutor in Bologna, gave a different account to Radio 25 in Italy, saying that Zaghba had been stopped en route to Istanbul because he was carrying nothing more than a knapsack, which raised suspicion.
“He told the security guard, who checked him — and then he corrected him- self — that he was going to be a terrorist,” Amato said.
Zaghba was arrested and his belongings were confiscated, but after a judge c harged with verifying the accusations against him found there were no grounds to hold him, they were returned, “so the contents on his device” were not examined, Amato said.
The third attacker, identi- fied as Rachid Redouane, 30, was denied asylum in Britain in 2009, according to news reports, and moved instead to Ireland, where he married, worked as a pastry chef and lived for a time in Dublin. He apparently managed to sneak into Britain through the porous Irish border to join the other attackers.
Of all the warning signs about Butt, the most detailed account was offered in an interview with Hasan, the member of the network of former extremists and the head of Islamic studies at the Quilliam foundation.
Last July 6, Hasan said, he ran into Butt at a Muslim family fair in East London. He was standing beside a fairground ride that his 9-yearold son had just mounted, when Butt, wearing a traditional Muslim robe and headdress, assailed him with abuse: “You take money from the government to work against Muslims. You spy on Muslims,” he raged.“You are a murtadd,” an epithet used by the Islamic State.
Then he tried to charge Hasan.
“He ran straight for me with his face contorted in hatred,” Hasan recalled.
A fight ensued with multiple people, including Butt’s wife, dressed in a face-covering veil. Hasan reported the episode to the police, emailing them photos of Butt that one of his family members had taken on a cellphone.
He told them Butt had displayed all the outward signs of a radicalized political Islamist he knew so well from his own past in radical circles and more recent de-radicalization work: the combination of a pious Islamic dress and long unkempt beard with the angry demeanor and the rehearsed lines.
“I told them I was certain these guys were Al Muhajiroun,” Hasan said. “I said they are a national security threat. They need to be monitored.”