British police say attacker had been on their radar
Warnings received years before assaults on London Bridge
British police and the MI5 domestic security agency acknowledged Monday that they had been aware of one of the three London Bridge attackers, Khuram Shazad Butt, 27, a British citizen born in Pakistan, but they had no specific intelligence to indicate he was plotting an assault.
Butt was publicly identified Monday along with Rachid Redouane, 30, who had claimed to be Moroccan and Libyan. Police shot and killed the attackers within eight minutes of receiving an emergency call Saturday night. Authorities were still trying to identity the third assailant.
After ramming a rented van into pedestrians on London Bridge, three men armed with knives went on a stabbing rampage in nearby Borough Market. Seven people were killed and 48 injured. Eighteen people remained in critical condition.
Butt and Redouane were living in Barking, in east London. Police arrested 12 people soon after the attack, but all were released without charges, London police said late Monday.
Police said they were working to uncover information about the men, including places they may have frequented, whether they had any connections to extremist networks or were supported by anyone else, and what their movements were in the days and hours before the attack.
The Islamic State, or ISIS, said it was responsible for the vehicle and knife assault, but that claim has not been substantiated. Other attacks have been committed without direct ISIS involvement by terrorists who are sympathizers of the radical group.
An unidentified friend of Butt’s told the BBC he contacted authorities twice after becoming concerned that his friend may have become radicalized. The friend said the warnings were not heeded, the British broadcaster said.
The friend told the BBC that some of Butt’s views may have been picked up while watching YouTube videos of Ahmad Musa Jibril, an American-Palestinian Islamic cleric who preaches radical viewpoints. The Counter Extremism Project, a think tank, said Jibril may have influenced some Westerners to fight in Syria.
Separately, a neighbor of Butt’s said she also reported him to authorities after he tried to convert her children to Islam and radicalize them, The Telegraph reported. Erica Gasparri, who lived near the suspect, said she reported him to police two years ago, but no action appeared to have been taken.
Gasparri said she confronted the man after two of her children came home and said, “Mummy, I want to become a Muslim.”
“He would go down to the park and talk to them about Islam. He also came to the houses and gave the kids money and sweets during Ramadan,” she said.
Butt appeared in a documentary that aired last year called The
Jihadis Next Door, which warned of the rise of Islamist extremists in London. In the documentary, Butt is seen praying near an ISIS flag in London’s Regent’s Park.
Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation, a British Muslim group that advocates “peaceful co-existence,” said Monday that he was verbally assaulted by Butt in Westminster in May 2013, the day after British Army soldier Lee Rigby was murdered by two extremists who said they were avenging the killing of Muslims by British troops. Shafiq said Butt “called me a
Murtad, which means ‘traitor’ in Arabic, and accused me of being a government stooge” for his public campaign against Rigby’s murder and Islamic extremism. He said police escorted Butt away.
“Many of us in the British Muslim community have been demanding action against these extremists to no avail,” he said in a statement.