LONDON - Two Muslim hard-liners said the man seen wielding a bloody butcher’s knife after the killing of a British soldier is a Muslim convert who took part in demonstrations with the banned radical group al-Muhajiroun.
Two suspects were shot by the police and taken to hospitals.
Meanwhile, British police Thursday evening announced the arrests of two more suspects in the case. Police said a man and a woman, both 29, were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to murder.
Former al-Muhajiroun head Anjem Choudary said the man in video footage that emerged after the killing was Michael Adebolajo, a Christian who converted to Islam around 2003 and took part in several of the group’s demonstrations in London.
BBC broadcast footage from 2007 showed the man standing near Choudary at a rally.
Omar Bakri Muhammad - who now lives in Lebanon but had been a radical Muslim preacher in London - also said he recognized the man seen on television as Adebolajo and said Adebolajo attended his London lectures in the early 2000s. Police have not named Adebolajo.
Bakri said he remembers Adebolajo as a “shy person” who was keen to learn about Islam and asked interesting questions.
“He used to listen more than he spoke,” Bakri said. “I was very surprised to learn that he is the suspect in the attack.”
A second person hospitalized after the attack has not yet been identified.
The two men suspected of butchering the British soldier had been part of previous investigations by security services, a British official said Thursday, as investigators searched several locations and tried to determine whether the men were part of a wider plot to instill terror on the streets of London.
The men, suspected of hacking the off-duty soldier while horrified bystanders watched, boasted of their exploits and warned of more violence in images recorded on witnesses’s mobile phones. Holding bloody knives and a meat cleaver, they waited for the arrival of police, who shot them in the legs, according to a passer-by who tried to save the dying soldier.
A British government official said one of two men purportedly linked to the death of the soldier tried to go to Somalia to train or fight with the terrorist group al-Shabab. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the police investigation, would not tell The Associated Press whether the suspect had been arrested or whether he had made any other trips to the country.
Citing unnamed sources with “knowledge of British jihadis,” the BBC’s Newsnight program reported Wednesday that one of the suspects in the attack was arrested last year on his way to joining al-Shabab.
Prime Minister David Cameron vowed that Britain would not be cowed by the violence and that it would reject “the poisonous narrative of extremism on which this violence feeds.” Cameron would not confirm or deny the reports that the men were known to the security services as potential militants.
“You would not expect me to comment on this when a criminal investigation is ongoing,” he said.
“The people who did this were trying to divide us,” Cameron said after a high-level national-security committee meeting. “They should know something like this will only bring us together and make us stronger.”
“This view is shared by every community in our country. This was not just an attack on Britain and on the British way of life; it was also a betrayal of Islam and of the Muslim communities who give so much to our country,” he said.
In Washington, President Barack Obama said the United States “stands resolute with the United Kingdom” in the fight against violent extremism.
There were few signs of alarm in the British capital, which has been hit by terrorist attacks during a long confrontation with the Irish Republican Army and more recently by al-Qaida-inspired attacks.
“It’s hateful, it’s horrific and upsetting. But it doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference,” Christian White, 43, said at King’s Cross station, close to the site of a subway bombing in July 2005. “Londoners are used to living in a city where life is complicated.”
Even so, security was increased at military barracks and installations in the capital, with extra armed guards added in many cases. Police said extra patrols were added at sensitive areas, including places of worship, transport hubs and congested areas.
Britain’s Ministry of Defense said the soldier killed was Lee Rigby of 2nd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. Rigby, a 25-year-old with a 2-year-old son, Jack, joined the army in 2006 and was posted first to Cyprus and later served in Afghanistan and Germany. He took up a recruiting post with the military in London in 2011.
Wednesday’s attack took place near a military barracks in the Woolwich area of south London.
Britain’s security threat remained the same since Wednesday’s attack, but security officials said they were reviewing preparations for next month’s Group of Eight summit in Northern Ireland. Obama and other world leaders are expected to attend the meeting June 17-18.
Information for this article was contributed by Gregory Katz, Paisley Dodds, Cassandra Vinograd, Sylvia Hui, Matt Surman, Danica Kirka and Zeina Karam of The Associated Press and by John F. Burns and Alan Cowell of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 7 on 05/24/2013