Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Two of three U.K. attackers on police radar
LONDON — Details emerged Tuesday about the three London Bridge attackers: a Pakistan-born customer service clerk, a Moroccan pastry chef and an Italian man who told authorities he “wanted to be a terrorist.”
At least two of the men were known to British intelligence and law enforcement officials, raising questions about whether anything could have been done to stop the attack, which began Saturday when the men drove a rented van into a crowd and then leaped out to stab people who crossed their paths. Seven people were killed and nearly 50 wounded. All three of the attackers were shot dead by police.
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said it was fair to ask how the attackers “slipped through our net.”
“People are going to look at the front pages today and they’re going to say, ‘How on earth could we have let this guy or possibly more through the net? What happened?’” he told Sky News.
Security has become a key issue in the run-up to Thursday’s general election. British security officials said none of the men was considered violent, but they acknowledged the difficulty of predicting whether extremists will turn dangerous. The assault was the third attack in three months in which most of the assailants had been on authorities’ radar at some point.
As the investigation expanded to look at how the men knew one another and whether they were part of a larger conspiracy, Pakistani intelligence authorities swooped Tuesday into the town of Jhelum, where Khurum Butt lived until he was 7, when he moved to the United Kingdom. His cousin,
18-year-old Bilal Dar, said Butt’s uncle was taken in for questioning. It was unclear if he was detained.
“Our family is hurt by what he did,” Dar said in the town east of Pakistan’s capital. “This has destroyed our family’s pride.”
Butt, 27, embraced radical Islam during his time in London and was once filmed in a documentary called The Jihadis Next Door. In the film, he was seen with a group unfurling a black-and-white flag associated with the Islamic State extremist group. The men were followers of Anjem Choudary, a preacher who was jailed for his support of the Islamic State and who once praised the Sept. 11, 2001, attackers.
It is thought that Choudary played a key role in Butt’s radicalization, according to a British government official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the ongoing investigation. Choudary’s now-banned al-Muhajiroun group was linked to one of Butt’s alleged connections, Sajeel Shahid, according to the British government official who again spoke on condition of anonymity.
Shahid allegedly provided al-Qaida terror training to Mohammed Siddique Khan, one of the four suicide bombers who killed 52 people during London’s morning rush hour in 2005. He was also accused of training other terror suspects in Britain, though Shahid’s whereabouts were not immediately confirmed late Tuesday.
During his time in the U.K., Butt once worked for Transport of London as a customer service clerk but failed his probation after a few months on the job after attendance issues. He also worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken and used a gym in east London. In his spare time, he tried to recruit followers to the Islamic State — a practice that prompted a neighbor to report him to the police in 2015.
He was one of about 3,000 suspects who were known to British authorities but was not part of the country’s 500 active investigations.
“The problem occurs when we know someone is moving in extremist circles but we don’t have evidence to indicate that they are plotting an attack,” said the British government official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “That’s where the question of resources comes into play.”
Police identified the second attacker as 30-year-old Rachid Redouane, also known as Rachid Elkhdar, who claimed to have both Moroccan and Libyan roots and worked as a pastry chef in Ireland, where he had lived within the past five years as well as the east London suburb of Dagenham.
He married a British woman named Charisse O’Leary, who posted on Facebook last month that Redouane was negligent in seeing their young daughter and that on one planned visit, he told her: “I’m going swimming.” The couple is thought to have split. O’Leary was one of 13 people arrested after Saturday’s attacks. Twelve were later released. One man is still being held.
Redouane was never under surveillance by Irish authorities, and Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald urged caution in speculating about his movements. Several British media reports on Tuesday, however, said he had been denied political asylum in Britain in 2009 but allowed to work years afterward in Ireland after he married his British wife. British officials could not immediately confirm the reports.
The third attacker was identified as Youssef Zaghba, a 22-year-old Italian national of Moroccan descent who was reportedly working in a London restaurant.
An Italian prosecutor said Zaghba told authorities after being stopped last year at the Bologna, Italy, airport that he “wanted to be a terrorist,” but then quickly corrected himself.
There was not enough evidence to arrest or charge Zaghba when authorities questioned him at the Marconi airport on March 15, 2016, Bologna prosecutor Giuseppe Amato said Tuesday. Amato told Italy’s Radio 24 that Zaghba was flagged to British authorities as a “possible suspect.”
Zaghba was stopped while trying to take a flight to Turkey on his way to Syria, Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported Tuesday.
After that, Amato said, any time Zaghba was in Italy, he was tracked by Italian intelligence officers.
“We did everything we could have done,” he said. “But there weren’t elements of proof that he was a terrorist. He was someone who was suspicious because of his way of behaving.”
Over the past two years, Italy has expelled 181 people who were suspected of extremist activities but for whom there was insufficient evidence to bring formal charges. Zaghba’s Italian citizenship prevented such an expulsion, Italian daily Repubblica reported.
His mother said her son used to show her videos of Syria and wanted to go “because it was a place where you could live according to a pure Islam.”
Valeria Collina was quoted by Italian weekly news magazine L’Espresso as saying she last spoke to her son Thursday and now realizes it was a goodbye call. She said she tried to keep him away from radical friends but that “he had the Internet and from there he got everything.”
FLAK OVER POLICE NUMBERS
Prime Minister Theresa May, who called the snap election in hopes of strengthening her mandate for discussions over the U.K.’s exit from the European Union, has come under fire for the cuts to police numbers in recent years.
The number of police officers in England and Wales fell by almost 20,000 between 2010 and 2016 — years when May, as home secretary, was in charge of policing.
The two main candidates for prime minister — the incumbent May and the challenger Jeremy Corbyn — traded barbs over how security services can better protect the public after three mass-casualty attacks in as many months.
May, a Conservative, said authorities will need greater powers to crack down on extremism and that Corbyn had blocked such efforts. Corbyn, the far-left leader of the opposition Labor Party, accused May of starving police and other security services of personnel and funds.
Both agreed that the country will have to make changes as security services — which for years successfully thwarted attacks on British soil — struggle to confront a threat that is growing in scale and tempo.
The country’s official terror threat level remains at “severe,” one notch below the highest.
May told Sky News, “I absolutely recognize people’s concerns.” She said that MI5, the intelligence service, would launch a review into how the case was handled.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan criticized the cuts to the police under the Conservative-led government and argued that London could lose front-line police officers if May’s Conservative Party triumphs in the election.
The Labor-party mayor told the BBC that the responsibility for the bloodshed lies with the attackers but said that “there’s no doubt that fewer police officers means we are in more danger.”
When asked if the U.K. should rescind the offer of a state visit to President Donald Trump after Trump’s recent criticism of Khan, the London mayor said he had not changed his view that a state visit was inappropriate.
In a separate appearance on ITV, Khan accused Trump of making “ignorant” comments about Muslims, but he insisted he did not want to engage in a war of words.
“We are not kids in playground,” Khan said. “He’s the president of the USA. I’m too busy to respond to his tweets. Isn’t he busy?”