One British man was identified by the police as one of the deadly assailants as eight more were arrested in probe into deadly attack near UK parliament.
It is now clear that the suspect of the attack that took place outside the UK parliament was a British. This is according to Prime Minister Theresa May. She said these as police conduct several overnight raids across the country.
According to the police, the British citizen who is linked with the UK attack is identified as Khalid Masood. Khalid is said to have string of criminal convictions.
Khalid Masood, a 52 years old British man was born in Kent to the southeast of London. Khalid had been most recently residing in central England.
“Khalid was not the subject of any current investigations and there exist no prior intelligence concerning his intent to be involved in terrorist attack,” said London police in a statement.
However, Khalid was known to police since he has a range of recent convictions for assaults that includes Grievous Bodily Harm (GBH), public offence and being in possession of offensive weapons.
The police added that the suspect had not been convicted recently for any terrorism offences.
On Thursday, in a statement to the House of Common, the Prime Minister Theresa stated that the intelligence officers had once carried out investigation on Khalid Masood over concern of” violent extremism.”
One of the intelligence officers said that Khalid was a peripheral figure and his case is very historic though he was no part of the current intelligence picture.
The responsibility of last Thursday’s deadly attack has been claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group. On their Iraq website, the group claimed that they carried out the operation as a strong symbolic response to calls for targeting citizens of the coalition of states or countries that are against ISIL both in Iraq and Syria.
Scepticism was expressed towards the claim made by ISIL by Joseph Downing from the London School of Economics.
“According to me, this is something that is quite common over the previous couple of years, over the terrorism attack in Europe, that ISIL jumps on the bandwagon in the most horrific way and says, ‘Yes, this is our soldier’, when there is actually no any string linking the assailant carrying out the attack and any particular group,” added Mr. Downing.
According to the Police, a total of 40 people were wounded and seven of them were in critical condition while 29 others were being treated in hospital and thereafter were discharged to go home.
Theresa May confirmed that in the attack, the wounded were 12 Britons, two Romanians, two Greeks, three French children, four South Koreans and one each from United States, Italy, China, Poland , Germany and Ireland.
Among the wounded were three police officers.
Keith Palmer, a 48-years old officer was stabbed to death, the other victims were two members of the public – a man in his mid -50s and a woman in her mid- 40s and the fourth death was the attacker.
