One of the three London Bridge terrorists was on police bail when he carried out the attack and had vowed to fly a black flag over Downing Street, The Times can reveal.
Khuram Butt’s house had been raided this year by Scotland Yard officers on a criminal matter as part of a disruption tactic used during active counterterrorism investigations.
Butt, 27, had been a key player in the proscribed terrorist group al-Muhajiroun, led by the terrorist recruiter Anjem Choudary, since at least 2009 and an FBI informant mentioned him in a report in 2015.
Jesse Morton, 38, spent years recruiting for al-Qaeda before joining the FBI as an undercover operative stalking shadowy chat rooms to monitor extremist activities. He met Butt on Paltalk, a platform used by Choudary and his associate Omar Bakri Mohammed, a hate preacher now in a Lebanon jail.
“He was already drunk on the ideology way back then,” said Mr Morton, who was jailed in 2012 for threats of violence before working for the agency. “He said to me, ‘Brother, you make the ultimate sacrifices for your religions. I respect that, I want to learn’. ”
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The group, which included the Isis militant Siddhartha Dhar, who fled to Syria while also on police bail, shared speeches by Anwar al-Awlaki, the late al-Qaeda chief, and vowed that the “black flag will reign over Downing Street and White House”, Mr Morton said. Images emerged yesterday of a young Butt in nightclub with friends in baggy jeans and a T-shirt. In one image he is wearing a red baseball cap in stark contrast to the traditional Muslim clothing he adopted in recent years. Friends said he would drink and smoke cannabis.
Butt had worked as an office manager and on the London Underground but also claimed unemployment benefits for at least two years.
A fellow extremist who appeared alongside him on the Channel 4 documentary The Jihadis Next Door, praised him yesterday as “an amazing brother” and claimed that the raid, together with UK foreign policy, had prompted Butt to carry out the atrocity.
Ricardo MacFarlane, a former member of a “Muslim Patrol” that tried to enforce Sharia in largely Muslim areas, claimed that Butt, whom he knew as Abu Zaitun, had changed after the arrest and raid at his flat in Barking, east London, four or five months ago.
Sources confirmed that Butt had been on bail for offences not related to terrorism.
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“He was a good friend. He was nice, even when he was clearly shaken by what was happening around the world. He was an amazing brother, his character, the way he carried himself,” MacFarlane, 29, said.
“I saw him about three months ago. That was the last time I saw him. He came to see me. He seemed different — he seemed like something was up. Something definitely was wrong.
“He’s usually a happy person but the last time I saw him he said his house was raided. When his mum did find out he was raided she had a heart attack. That’s what radicalised him. I don’t know exactly why they raided him. Everyone [we know] gets raided.”
He added: “Abu Zaitun was always looking at what’s happening with Muslims, he always had concerns.”
A security source said Butt was well known to Scotland Yard as a “player” in al-Muhajiroun.
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He was the subject of frequent police attention and was “on bail until quite recently, possibly at the time of the attack” for minor offences.
“The difficulty with Butt is he was a player, he was a target for us, he looked like he might do something but he was never caught planning an attack.”
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