London attacker casts harsh light on Birmingham
The 52-year-old ex-con authorities say orchestrated London’s Westminster Bridge rampage has cast a new spotlight on his British city, which has produced dozens of convicted terrorists in recent years, many from only a handful of neighborhoods.
Khalid Masood, a recent Birmingham resident, had a lengthy criminal record including assault and weapons charges before police say he sped a rented SUV through pedestrians on the Westminster Bridge and onto Parliament on Wednesday, killing three people before stabbing a police officer to death.
A 75-year-old man, who police did not identify, became the fourth victim when he died from his wounds yesterday. Police also scoured London and Birmingham, arresting eight and searching other properties, including in Wales, yesterday as ISIS claimed responsibility for the lone-wolf attack.
Police said the U.K.-born Masood, who authorities shot and killed amid his attack, was not under active investigation and that they had “no prior intelligence” that pointed to him launching a terrorist attack. British Prime Minister Theresa May called him “a peripheral figure” whom counterintelligence officials had previously examined for links to violent extremism.
But his ties to Birmingham, where he had lived until late last year, raised more questions about the city of about 1.1 million. There had been 39 people charged with “Islamism-inspired terrorism” offenses since the late 1990s who had lived in Birmingham, the most of any city outside London, according to a report by the Henry Jackson Society, a British think tank, released earlier this month. London, for comparison, had 117 amid a population of more than 8 million.
In all, about one of every 10 accused terrorists in Britain hailed from just a handful of constituencies in Birmingham.
The case is an example of authorities and others having to work harder to reach people in certain neighborhoods across Britain, said Bob Milton, a former Scotland Yard commander.
“We made some terrible mistakes when we started,” Milton said on Boston Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting” show yesterday on connecting with Muslim communities. “Reaching out to any community can be difficult. There is a level of mistrust and suspicion of police service. … But you just have to be persistent and you have to try to claim that level of trust in those communities.”