The British police are refusing to utter three simple words: radical Islamic terrorism.
On Monday, the Metropolitan police claimed that they found no evidence that Khalid Masood, the 52-year-old Muslim man who killed three people and injured 50 others last week when he rammed his SUV into pedestrians on Westminster bridge before stabbing a police officer patrolling Parliament, was connected to ISIS or Al-Qaeda. There was also no evidence that Masood was radicalized during his 2003 prison stint, police added.
Deputy assistant Metropolitan police commissioner Neil Basu has been chosen as the point man responsible for divorcing last week’s horrific terror attack from Islam. Despite Masood’s clear links to Islamist ideology, Basu has downplayed Masood’s role of jihadist, going so far as to claim that the attacker’s motives may never be knowable.
“We must all accept that there is a possibility we will never understand why he did this. That understanding may have died with him,” the post-modern state propagandist suggested.
After repeatedly stressing the fact that Masood “acted alone,” Basu insisted that “there is no information or intelligence to suggest there are further attacks planned.”
“His attack method appears to be based on low sophistication, low tech, low cost techniques copied from other attacks, and echo the rhetoric of IS leaders in terms of methodology and attacking police and civilians, but at this stage I have no evidence he discussed this with others,” Basu noted in a statement.
“There has been much speculation about who Masood was in contact with immediately prior to the attack,” Basu said. “All I will say on this point is that Masood’s communications that day are a main line of enquiry.”
According to the Metropolitan police’s point man on making Islam look sparkly clean, any suggestion that Masood was radicalized was “pure speculation.”
Basu’s remarks come as ISIS claims responsibility for the attack, calling Masood a “soldier of the Islamic State.”
“The perpetrator of the attacks [last Thursday] in front of the British Parliament in London is an Islamic State soldier and he carried out the operation in response to calls to target citizens of the coalition,” an ISIS propaganda statement read.
Moreover, British police have made at least six arrests in relation to the terrorism incident. All of the suspects were detained in the heavily Muslim city of Birmingham.