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-year-old 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 Moroccan-Libyan 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.
Company officials said they had no evidence that either of the other attackers worked at any of the franchises.
Both Butt and Zaghba were known to British law enforcement, raising questions about whether anything could have been done to prevent the assault.
Italian authorities said Zaghba was stopped at the Bologna airport in March 2016 and questioned, but never charged with a crime. Italian officials said suspicions about him were shared with British authorities and his name was listed in the Europe-wide intelligence-sharing system. He was also stopped at London’s Stansted airport in January, but let go.
Collina said police called her after her son was stopped at Bologna airport and asked if she knew he was going to Turkey. Collina said she urged them to detain her son and prevent him from going.
“When they asked him what he was going to do in Istanbul, rather than saying ‘tourist’ he said ‘terrorist,’” Collina told The Associated Press and other media, calling that a “mental lapse” and not a sign of intent. However, she said she and the police assumed he wanted to eventually go to Syria, given he only had a one-way ticket to Istanbul and a small backpack.
His passport and cellphone were seized, but he got them back after a court determined there wasn’t enough evidence to arrest him.
Collina said Zaghba was monitored by Italian intelligence agents each time he came to Italy to visit her after that initial run-in with authorities. She said she told her son to be careful about anything he did after that, including surfing the internet, adding that she didn’t approve of his London friends and never felt comfortable in his London neighborhood.
Although news of her son’s death came as a shock, she said she could only share the pain of the victims’ families. “It’s something that has no sense, for any religion, or any ideology,” she said, choking back tears and calling her son’s actions a “deviation of terror.”