From nice guy to terrorist
A businesswoman partner, two devoted daughters and all the middle-class trappings... then a descent into drugs and jail that ended in carnage
www. sundaytimes. lk
He had a middle-class upbringing and lived with his attractive partner in a neat bungalow with a nameplate. Khalid Masood's background in the heart of Middle England was as far removed from the stereotype image of an Islamic State 'soldier' as it is possible to imagine.
Security services are now investigating what drove a middle-aged English tutor from the Home Counties to unleash Wednesday's Westminster atrocity – the worst terror attack on British soil since the July 7 bombings in 2005.
While IS recruitment propaganda typically shows disaffected young men posing with AK-47s and militaristic camouflage gear, Masood was 52 and a father-of-three when he decided to kill.
Even in the hours before the attack, witnesses said he was smiling and polite as he chatted about his plans to visit London, adding: 'It isn't what it used to be.'
Masood had lived briefly in the capital, but grew up in the affluent towns of Rye, East Sussex, and Tunbridge Wells in Kent, where friends recalled him as a popular, intelligent schoolboy who was obsessed with football and had no interest in religion.
He was born Adrian Russell Elms on Christmas Day, 1964, and his birth certificate gives his single mother's name as Janet Elms, a 17- year- old office worker from Croydon in South London.
His father's name is not recorded, although Miss Elms married Phillip Ajao two years later and he is listed as Masood's father in later records.
School friends at the Huntley School for Boys in Tunbridge Wells knew him as Adrian Ajao – or 'black Ade' – and said he was popular and fun-loving.
Friend Kenton Till said: ' He was very bright, very academic and he was very good at football.
'He wasn't religious at all. He was a big character, very friendly and a good laugh. He might have been the only black kid at the school. He experienced a little bit of racism but not a lot because he always tried to be popular.'
Classmate Alan Keeble recalled a ' happy- go- lucky' character who excelled at sport and ' loved life', including reggae dance nights and a teenage flirtation with Mr Keeble's sister.
' He was in with everybody and everybody accepted him, because obviously a lot of us had never seen a black child before from Tunbridge Wells,' he said. 'I'm very shocked that he's done this.'
Another friend, Tim Burchell, said Masood would sing soul music, 'with a voice like Marvin Gaye'. 'A whole load of us would go round to his house. He had a brilliant voice, a really good singer.'
Despite his academic promise and popularity, Masood's life appeared to go off the rails soon after he left Huntley secondary school and began working at a local branch of Woolworths.
He was thrown out of a schoolmate's party after arriving with a drunken group of friends who had been smoking cannabis, and drifted away from his old school friends as he became involved with drugs.
A friend who asked not to be named said: ' In the early years he was all right – chirpy and cheeky and one of the lads. We used to go out drinking.
'As he got older he got a bit distant and lost his way, and I just put that down to drugs. He got into drug dealing or taking drugs. He owed people a lot of money and then he just disappeared.'
The friend said the teenage Masood had shown no interest in religion and had 'moaned' when his favourite pub had been turned into a mosque.
At 19 he received his first court conviction, for criminal damage in 1983, and he became increasingly involved in petty and violent crime.
Over the next two decades the burly bodybuilder was to be convicted of a catalogue of offences including assaults, grievous bodily harm, possession of weapons and public order offences, and was jailed twice.