London attacker’s mom blames internet for radicalizing son

LONDON — The youngest of the London Bridge attackers pleaded with his mother to settle with him in Syria but instead moved to Britain where his extremist views hardened and he fell into the company of a bloodthirsty gang that launched the latest attack on British streets, his mother said Wednesday.

Valeria Khadija Collina last spoke with her 22-year-old son, Youssef Zaghba, by telephone just two days before he and two other men plowed a van into a crowd near London Bridge and went on a stabbing rampage. Eight people were killed and dozens wounded. All three of the assailants were shot dead.

Zaghba, an Italian national of Moroccan descent, initially told his mother that he wanted to go to Syria to start a family in a religious Islamic climate — not to fight. But he changed, she said, when he went to Britain about a year ago and was seduced by radical views propagated on the internet.

“Last year ... when I went to England, he was ... more rigid,” Collina, an Italian convert to Islam, told reporters in a series of interviews at her home in Bologna, Italy. “From his face, from his look, I could see there was a radicalization, as you say. And this happened in England, absolutely.”

The other two attackers were identified as Khurum Butt, a 27-yearold whose extremist views had been reported to police, and 30-year-old Rachid Redouane, also known as Rachid Elkhdar, a pastry chef who claimed to have dual Moroccanlibyan citizenship.

It was not immediately clear how the three knew each other, but Collina said one of her son’s friends recognized one of the other attackers, though it wasn’t clear which one that was.

Butt, who was born in Pakistan and moved to Britain as a child, had worked in 2015 in the office at Auriga Holdings Ltd, which manages some Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises in Britain.

Both Butt and Zaghba were known to British law enforcement, raising questions about whether anything could have been done to prevent the assault.