British authorities have identified the third man involved in the London Bridge/Borough Market terror attack as 22-year-old Youssef Zaghba. Zaghba was of Italian-Moroccan descent, and according to a report from La Repubblica, an Italian news outlet, he was on record as a person of interest.
Police name 3rd London attacker. Youssef Zaghba, 22, was an Italian of Moroccan descent who lived in east London https://t.co/N3nU1rF998 pic.twitter.com/oMELL9lJW9
— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) June 6, 2017
On March 15, 2016, Zaghba was allegedly stopped at an airport in Bologna. According to La Repubblica, Zaghba was en route to Istanbul with an intended destination of Syria. In addition to appearing agitated, he had “no luggage” aside from a backpack.
When airport agents approached him and asked him why he was flying to Istanbul, he stated: “I am going to be a terrorist.” With that confession, officials had his home in Italy searched, taking his computer and other electronic devices, on which they found Islamic State propaganda.
La Repubblica reports:
[Zaghba] received a criminal charge for international terrorism. A hurried examination of his cell phone showed the presence of propaganda videos from ISIS, and his collection of SIM cards from different countries appeared as a suspicious element as well. For these reasons, the district attorney’s office ordered a complete examination of his cell phone and laptop found in his house.
But before the investigations could be conducted, the appeals courthouse accepted a motion presented by the Italian-Moroccan young man. The judges found the evidence pointing to international terrorism to be insufficient, and ordered the immediate restitution of the confiscated devices. This decision prevented the authorities from completing controls on his representatives.
According to The Washington Free Beacon: “A few months later, Zaghba moved to the U.K. to work as a waiter at a Pakistani restaurant in London.”
The Guardian reports: “An Italian intelligence anti-terrorism office told [us] the country’s anti-terrorism office based in Rome sent an alert to MI5, the UK’s domestic intelligence agency.”
U.K. intelligence groups are “puzzled” by this, however, as Zaghba was not on their running list of 23,000 persons of interest, and they “have found no such alert or direct communication” from Italian officials.
The Guardian adds:
An Italian diplomatic source, seeking to clear up the apparent discrepancy between the Italian press accounts and the UK security services, said Zaghba, who had been living in Casablanca until March 2016 before returning to Italy, had been stopped during a routine search and found to have jihadi material.
The source said that the information had been uploaded onto a European database, one to which several names a day were sent, highlighting Zaghba as a subject of risk of being radicalised.
That database, notes La Repubblica, is called the Schengen Information System (SIS), which, according the European Commission website, “is a highly efficient large-scale information system that supports external border control and law enforcement cooperation in the Schengen States.”
For the uninitiated, the Schengen States are a bloc of 26 European nations that have essentially wiped away borders with each member-state, per the 1985 Schengen Agreement.
“The SIS enables competent authorities, such as police and border guards, to enter and consult alerts on certain categories of wanted or missing persons and objects,” reports the European Commission website. “An SIS alert not only contains information about a particular person or object but also clear instructions on what to do when the person or object has been found.”
According to La Repubblica:
The circumstances of Zaghba’s arrest at the Bologna airport in March 2016, his international terrorism charge, and his surveillance status were in fact entered in the SIS … And the British had access to that information.
As reported in the system, in January of this year, British police on duty at London’s Stansted airport stopped Zaghba, who was flying in from Bologna, for additional screening, and checked the database, which included all information about his arrest at the Bologna airport a year earlier, and his “under surveillance” status in Italy.
As this is an ongoing investigation, any new information coming from news outlets must be taken in a measured way, with full knowledge that it might not be fully accurate. However, if it is indeed true that Youssef Zaghba was in the SIS database, and was known not only to Italian officials but to British officials as well, it would be a royal mess, especially considering the information coming out about one of Zaghba’s partners, Khuram Butt.
According to multiple outlets, Butt was well-known to law enforcement. The Independent reports that he had “been reported twice to the police — once for accessing online Islamist propaganda and the second time for attempting to indoctrinate children.”
Additionally, he allegedly appeared in a documentary called The Jihadis Next Door, “about the presence of violent Muslim extremists in British cities. He was seen in the programme among a group of men unfurling a black Islamist flag and then in a confrontation with the police,” writes The Independent.