U.K. Parliament attack: Four dead and 20 injured in Westminster ‘terrorist incident’… The Islamic State claimed responsibility on Thursday for the deadly attack outside the British Parliament, as Prime Minister Theresa May described the assailant as a British-born man whom the country’s domestic intelligence agency had investigated for connections to violent extremism.
The London police identified him on Thursday afternoon as Khalid Masood, 52, who had a long criminal history but no terrorism convictions. He had been living recently around Birmingham, England, where the vehicle used in the attack was rented. The police released few other details about him. Hours earlier, addressing lawmakers who only a day earlier had been under lockdown, Mrs. May said the attacker was “a peripheral figure” who had been examined by MI5, Britain’s domestic counterintelligence agency, but who had not been “part of the current intelligence picture.”
Mrs. May said that officials were not ready to release the man’s name, but she added that “there was no prior evidence of his intent or of the plot” and that “our working assumption is that the attacker was inspired by Islamist ideology.” Barely an hour after Mrs. May finished speaking, the Islamic State group issued a statement on the messaging app Telegram, declaring that the attacker was a “soldier” who “carried out the operation in response to appeals” to fight Western powers involved in military operations in the Middle East.
