How British schoolboy became a radicalised jihadist and London attacker Khalid Masood

FROM a British schoolboy to violent jihadist Khalid Masood’s road to the London terror attack was via Saudi Arabia.

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FROM British schoolboy to violent jihadist, British-born Muslim convert Khalid Masood’s road to terror was long.

Just how the 52-year-old former teacher, criminal and father of three Masood became a killer is still being probed but a picture is emerging of a man who over many years went from an ordinary British schoolboy to an angry violent Islamic extremist on the intelligence files of spy group M15. His radical turn was unusual in that it came not in his youth but in his 30s and the reasons why were offshore.

Masood was born in Kent in south east England on Christmas Day 1964 and grew up in a single-parent household in numerous locations about the area including the picturesque seaside town of Rye, before moving to West Midlands and Birmingham. His mother Janet remarried and with his stepfather Phillip and brothers he had a normal early life.

He first came to the attention of police as a 19-year-old in 1983 when he was found guilty of criminal damage and within a few short years racked up numerous charges including assaults causing grievous bodily harm, public order offences and possessing of a knife before in 2003 he was convicted of stabbing a 22-year-old man in the face in the driveway of a nursing home. Masood was working as a TV aerial installer at the time and had already done jail time for a violent assault with wounding. According to British media, he spent time in Lewes jail in East Sussex as well as Wayland Prison in Norfolk and Ford prison in West Sussex.

The first picture of the London terror attacker Khalid Masood as a schoolboy. Picture: The Sun

In 1992 he had met a woman and had his first child but the relationship didn’t last.

London terror attacker Khalid Masood is treated by emergency services outside the Houses of Parliament London. He later died. Picture: Stefan Rousseau

After his jail time he worked in sales for a chemicals firm in Bodiam in East Sussex for more than a decade, using both the name Elms and his father’s surname Ajao, but in 2004 married British Muslim woman Farzana Malik from Kent and according to those who knew him, he started to change. A year later he moved to Saudi Arabia teaching English to workers at the General Authority of Civil Aviation in Jeddah before moving to Jubail. It was in this country he mixed with Wahhabi preachers who instructed him on the hard line form of the Islamic faith that the European Parliament last year branded the source of much of the terrorism around the world.

In 2009 Masood returned to the UK and continued teaching and three years later set up his own English language tutoring business for Arabic speakers in Birmingham and it was here he was said to be re-radicalised, picking up from his indoctrination in Saudi Arabia. He became a gym junkie and bodybuilder and preached to his neighbours of the benefits of having children in Muslim schools. He also spent a lot of time in West Ham in London where he attended the Al-Tawhid mosque in nearby Leyton and the mosque yesterday moved quickly to condemn his actions and declare his radical view was not fostered at their premises.

It was in recent times, the British Government said he came to the “periphery” of counter terrorist police intelligence as he began mixing with men suspected of wanting to travel to Syria to fight for Islamic State. But there was no indication he wanted to travel and he slipped far from the police radar but was viewed with suspicion by neighbours who said he could go from a nice guy to an angry rage fairly quickly in what one described as almost like having a split personality. Police confirmed there was no hint of what was to come from a man with the criminal past but no known terrorist threat.

His 69-year-old mother now living in Wales was on Friday being interviewed by police about her son; her husband Phillip Ajao, 77, was too ill and is in hospital.

Police made a number of dramatic raids on properties both in East London and a three-storey terrace in Winson Green in Birmingham where he lived up until December last year before moving to a small flat above a curry restaurant on the major thoroughfare Hagley Road nearby. Three men have been arrested at the property as to what they knew of the attack. His most recent partner Rohey Hydara was also arrested in East London.

A plainclothes policeman enters the home of 52-year-old British-born Khalid Masood in Quayside, Birmingham.

Meanwhile its been revealed on the night before the Westminster attack Massood rented a small budget hotel room in Brighton on the southern coast. It was in room 228 at Preston Park Hotel where he plotted the next day’s attack. The hotel’s bill receipt was found in the hire car he used to plough into people on the Westminster Bridge. He was friendly and chatty to staff, said London was “not what it used to be” and how he preferred his home in Birmingham. He asked for the cheapest room available. Such was his demeanour, hotel workers wrote on his computer booking “nice man”.