Whitehall knife suspect ‘spent several years in Afghanistan’
THE smirking terror suspect seized by police yards from Downing Street had spent several years in Afghanistan, a former friend said yesterday. Somali-born Khalid Mohammed Omar Ali, 27, travelled to the wartorn country after being refused permission to stay in the Gaza Strip by the territory’s government, run by Hamas which is on the EU’s terrorism blacklist.
Ali went to Afghanistan without telling his family, and had little contact with friends at home until he returned to the UK late last year.
He was also on a ship raided by Israeli soldiers as it challenged a naval blockade of the Gaza Strip in 2010.
The electrician, who followed the hardline Wahabi Islamic doctrine, was arrested on Thursday with a rucksack ‘full of knives’ on Whitehall, close to Parliament. Officers were lying in wait for the suspect, whose movements were being tracked by a joint police and MI5 operation after they were tipped off by his family.
Yesterday as police searched his family’s £400,000 terraced home in Edmonton, North London, details emerged of a ‘charismatic’ and academically gifted boy who became increasingly obsessed by hardline religious views in his teens.
Ali was on board the Mavi Marmara, part of a flotilla which was challenging an Israeli naval blockade of the Gaza Strip when it was intercepted by the Israeli Defence Forces in May 2010. Nine Turkish activists were killed in the raid.
Later that year he took part in an aid mission to Gaza called Road 2 Hope, which made headlines on the BBC after a Greek naval captain briefly held the group hostage in a dispute over money.
Another member of the aid mission said last night: ‘Khalid stood out from the crowd. He was very loud and confident and always talking about fight- ing for Muslims who were oppressed. He had this zeal about him.’
Photos of him during the tenweek trip to the self-governing Palestinian territory show him making a one-fingered salute and wearing the Palestinian flag as a headscarf.
The source said: ‘There were about 100 people in the convoy. They used to talk about the non-Muslims taking part really badly. They came from all over the country and I didn’t know what they were like until I was with them.
‘Khalid had this Saudi Wahabi ideology. It was all fundamentalism and jihad and the romance of it. He was like a coiled spring who referred to non-Muslims as “dirty kuffars” ( non- believers).’ When the group arrived in Gaza, Ali disappeared and only met up with the group as they prepared to leave a few days later after dropping off clothes, medicines and other items.
‘He was very vague about where he’d been but he had a brother who was working there, as a medic I think, and I think he was with him,’ he added.
‘His plan was not to come back but the government wouldn’t let him stay. They said that if anything happened to him they would be held responsible.’
Footage taken when the group met at Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire before setting off shows Ali sitting behind the wheel of a support van.
He says: ‘For all the brothers who stayed behind... you’re going to see us in action, doing our thing all day long, as usual... taking it to the limits. You feel me? One love.’
The group were due to have a reunion in London in January 2011 after their return but Ali failed to attend. They later discovered he had gone to Afghanistan. The friend said: ‘I heard his mother didn’t know where he was and was worried sick. She didn’t know he’d gone to Afghanistan. No one heard from him for years and I thought he was dead. Then, last November, he was back.
‘When I saw him on the news on Thursday, I recognised him straight away, although he’s put a bit of weight on. He’s got that same smirk.’
Markaiu Mason, a classmate of Ali’s at Northumberland Park Community School in Tottenham, North London, said: ‘At school he was a very popular person, he was very charismatic. Everybody generally really liked him. And he was super smart. He was in the highest classes with me in most of our joint sessions at school.’
But as Ali became a teenager, his attitude changed. He would often have ‘heated discussions’ about religion and started ‘preaching more’.
Mr Mason said: ‘I could see that he was starting to slowly change... his attitudes were starting to change and he was becoming more religious and I thought there’s something not quite right here.’
Scotland Yard said the Whitehall suspect was arrested on suspicion of possession of an offensive weapon and the ‘commission, preparation and instigation of acts of terror’.