Mother of London attacker says her son was radicalized online
The mother of one of the three men who attacked pedestrians on and near London Bridge on Saturday, killing eight and wounding dozens, says the internet radicalized her son, and his views became even more "rigid" after he moved to England.
Speaking to reporters from her home in Bologna, Italy, Valeria Khadija Collina, the mother of Youssef Zaghba, 22, said she could tell he had been radicalized "from his face, from his look." She said she visited Zaghba in London but didn't feel comfortable in his neighborhood and did not approve of his friends. Zaghba, an Italian national of Moroccan descent, told his mother he wanted to move to Syria to live under the Islamic State but not fight, she said, and he was stopped at the Bologna airport in March 2016 with a one-way ticket to Istanbul. He was never charged with any crime, but his name was entered into an intelligence sharing system used by European countries, The Associated Press reports.
Collina spoke with her son two days before the attack, and said they had a "sweet" conversation. Authorities don't yet know how Zaghba and the other attackers, Khurum Butt and Rachid Redouane, knew each other, and Collina said one of her son's friends claimed to recognize one of the other attackers. Collina disavowed the attack, saying it was "something that has no sense, for any religion, or any ideology."
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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