LONDON -- One of the men who carried out the deadly weekend attack in central London was a known radical Islamist who had been filmed unfurling a black flag resembling the one used by the Islamic State extremist group and raised the suspicion of a neighbor after allegedly trying to lure local youths to join his jihadist campaign.
Also Monday, the electoral campaign roared back into public view after a one-day hiatus, with Prime Minister Theresa May and Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn trading blame over each other's security stances.
British police on Monday identified the known radical Islamist, Khuram Shazad Butt, a 27-year-old Pakistan-born Briton, as one of the assailants, saying he was known to authorities though they had no evidence he was planning an attack. They also identified a second attacker who had not aroused suspicion before Saturday's rampage that killed seven people.
As details about Butt emerged, however, they prompted questions of whether he could have been stopped sooner.
He had appeared in a documentary, The Jihadis Next Door, that aired on British television last year. Neighbors identified Butt from the film's footage Monday, pointing to a scene in which he is shown participating in a provocative prayer session at Regents Park, near London's biggest mosque, helping to display a black flag covered in white Arabic lettering similar to the one used by the Islamic State, which took responsibility for the attack.
Butt is also seen in the film sprawling on the lawn and nodding as he listens to a sermon in which the speaker tells those gathered: "This is not the real life, my dear brothers. This is a passing time for us."
Butt's actions led a neighbor, Erica Gasparri, to contact police about 18 months ago. The 42-year-old mother of three was working at a school when she noticed Butt, who was also known as Abu Mohamed, meeting with children and trying to draw them into his radicalism.
"It was wrong what he was doing," Gasparri said. "He kept talking about the Islamic State. I got very angry."
Salaudeen Jailabdeen, who lived near Butt, said the accused had once been ejected from a mosque for interrupting an imam. Another neighbor, Michael Mimbo, said he saw the van used in the attack near his home Saturday but didn't see who was behind the wheel. He said the vehicle was seen going the wrong way down a one-way street and was later seen speeding off, followed closely by a small red car.
The second attacker was identified by police as Rachid Redouane, who alternately used the surname Elkhdar, and claimed to be Moroccan and Libyan. He used two different birth dates that would make him either 25 or 30, authorities said.
Police have not yet released the identity of the third person involved in carrying out the attack on London Bridge, where the van swerved into pedestrians, and in nearby Borough Market, where the knife-wielding assailants slashed and stabbed anyone in their path. Besides the dead, dozens more were wounded by the men, who wore fake suicide vests to make themselves look even more imposing.
All three were fatally shot by police. Twelve others taken into custody have since been released.
The attack took all of eight minutes, and though police have won praise for their response, it has led to a political fight certain to dominate the waning days before Thursday's national elections.
Campaign attacks
May served as home secretary for six years before becoming prime minister last year, a period in which the number of police dropped by about 20,000 officers. That fact provided a line of attack for Corbyn, who on Monday called for May to resign even as he said the best remedy was to vote her out.
"There's an election on Thursday, that's the chance," he said, citing an "appalling" cut in police employment levels. "We're calling for a restoration of police numbers, and there's a call being made for her to go, because of what she's done on the police numbers."
May said she has protected police budgets and increased the number of armed officers and matched Corbyn's finger-pointing with some of her own, saying her opponent wasn't fit to safeguard Britain at a time of heightened threat.
"We have given increased powers to the police to be able to deal with terrorists, powers which Jeremy Corbyn has boasted he has always opposed," she said.
Given the speed with which the attack was ended, it wasn't clear whether having more police on the beat would have prevented it, but questions persisted over whether investigators had the resources to look into such complaints and whether crucial opportunities were missed that could have saved lives.
Under the British government's counterterrorism program, residents are encouraged to alert police to suspicious activity. Police then cross-check whether the person has been reported for similar activity. From there, a number of scenarios can unfold.
The matter can be dropped, or, if the complaint seems warranted, police and security officials can open an investigation. The real test comes in determining whether the person has the potential to become violent and what resources are available to investigate. Watching a suspect around the clock can require some 20 officers or security agents.
"That is the awkward question going forward," said Andrew Silke, who has advised the House of Commons on preventing violent extremism. "A message should have been passed onto the counterterrorism section, and if the report had some degree of credibility, an assessment would have had to have been made. There's a genuine question mark over this now and how the government's risk-assessment framework is weighted.
"Given the recent attacks, it looks like people were on the radar, but somehow they were still able to carry out attacks."
Saturday's attack was the third in as many months where suspects had been on the radar of British authorities.
The U.K.'s official terror threat level had been set at "critical" in the days after the May 22 concert bombing in Manchester that killed 22 people -- reflecting a judgment that an attack might be imminent because accomplices with similar bombs might be on the loose.
It was lowered once intelligence agencies were comfortable that this wasn't the case. Authorities have said the London attack was apparently unconnected to the Manchester bombing.
May has said the three attacks -- including one outside Parliament in March -- weren't connected in any operational sense but were linked by what she called the "perverted ideology" of extremist Islam.
Most of the London Underground stations that had been shuttered after the attack were reopened, and some residents who had been cooped up inside emerged for the first time since the violence. Police were not yet releasing the names of the dead, but thousands of people gathered at Potters Field, across from the Tower Bridge and the medieval Tower of London, to pay tribute to the victims.
Speaking to those gathered, Mayor Sadiq Khan decried the attackers, saying, "You will not win. We will defeat the terrorists."
U.S. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, amplified his criticism of Khan over his response to the attack.
The president first went after Khan, one of Britain's most prominent Muslims, on Sunday over the mayor's statement that people had "no reason to be alarmed." Khan had been referring to the increased presence of armed police on London's streets in the wake of the attack.
Trump lashed out again Monday.
"Pathetic excuse by London Mayor Sadiq Khan who had to think fast on his 'no reason to be alarmed' statement," the president tweeted. Mainstream media "is working hard to sell it!"
Earlier Monday, before Trump's latest series of tweets, May was pushed hard before saying Trump was "wrong" to attack Khan. After avoiding several attempts by reporters to get her to condemn the U.S. president, May was asked what it would take for her to criticize Trump.
Instead, she reiterated her disappointment over his decision to pull out of the Paris agreement on climate change. After some further heckling at a news conference in central London, she went further.
"Sadiq Khan is doing a good job," she said. "It's wrong to say anything else."
White House spokesman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that "picking a fight with the mayor of London" was not the president's intent and that Trump was simply trying to argue that "we have to be more committed to national security."
Pressed on whether the comments could strain the relationship between the two countries in the aftermath of the terror attacks, Sanders said Trump was "extremely clear that we stand in complete solidarity" with London.
Sanders also denied that Trump had taken the mayor's remarks out of context, without providing an alternate explanation for what the president meant.
Information for this article was contributed by Danica Kirka, Paisley Dodds, Lori Hinnant, Gregory Katz, Raphael Satter and Matt Sedensky of The Associated Press and by Robert Hutton and Svenja O'Donnell of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 06/06/2017
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