LONDON � British Prime Minister Theresa May is being forced to defend her past record as the country's interior minister, and the political architect of Britain's counter-terror system, as more details emerge of the three attackers and what security agencies knew about them before their van-and-knife rampage Saturday in the heart of London.

Ahead of Thursday's vote in a snap post-Brexit parliamentary election, which May called with the expectation of securing a landslide victory, the terror attack is undermining the air of dogged competence May carefully crafted as the country's home secretary, a post she held for six years and relinquished on becoming prime minister last year.

Foreign Minister Boris Johnson conceded Tuesday that there were questions to answer about how the three militants slipped through the intelligence net. He was speaking as police named the third attacker as 22-year-old Italian-Moroccan Youssef Zaghba, who was on an Italian watchlist and suspected of being a foreign fighter.

Born in Fez, Morocco, in 1995 to an Italian mother and a Moroccan father, Zaghba was stopped by Italian police at the Bologna airport on March 15 of last year after arousing suspicions he was going to join the Islamic State terror group to fight in Syria.

Italian officials say he had a one-way ticket to Istanbul and was carrying just a small backpack. His cell phone, which was seized, contained jihadist content, including pictures and videos, and he was placed on a watchlist as a suspected foreign fighter. Italian officials say they shared intelligence on him with both the British and Moroccan security agencies.

Lived in Britain

The last few years Zaghba lived in Britain, where he worked on and off at a restaurant and a hotel near Regents Park, traveling back and forth to visit his mother, who lives in Bologna.

The naming of the third Islamic militant came after it emerged earlier Tuesday that the ringleader of Saturday's attack, 27-year-old British-Pakistani Khuram Shazad Butt worked for a man accused of helping to train the Islamic extremists responsible for the July 7, 2005 underground train bombings in London, Britain's first Islamist suicide attack. Fifty-two people were killed across Britain's capital in the coordinated strike and more than 700 others were injured.

Counterterror analysts say they are surprised that Butt remained a "low priority" for the security services despite his close connections to Sajeel Shahid, a 41-year-old who ran an all-Muslin gym in east London and was named in a New York court case as having helped to set up weapons training in Pakistan for the July 7 suicide bombers.

It was a blunder to have downgraded the terror threat in Britain so quickly after the Manchester bombing, said Olivier Guitta, managing director at GlobalStrat, a security and geopolitical risk firm. He says with election campaigning under way coinciding with Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, the chances of attacks were always high.

Guitta, who has advised government in the past on counterterrorism, said, No one should be surprised by the terrorism wave and which is linked to a policy of laissez-faire policy toward extremists.

The main charge leveled against May by Labour politicians and the leaders of the country's smaller parties is the large cuts she introduced on funding for Britain's police. Those cuts resulted in police personnel being drawn down from 2010 to 2016 by more than 20,000 officers.

Uncertain election impact

On Monday, the opposition parties received support for their criticism from an unlikely quarter. Conservative insider Steve Hilton, the policy guru of former Prime Minister David Cameron, demanded May resign over what he termed security failures, which he said led to Saturday's attack and the bombing of a concert last month in Manchester.

He said May should be resigning, not seeking re-election.

Pollsters are wary of predicting how the terrorist attacks � three in the past 10 weeks � will impact the voting on Thursday, but Labour leaders say they have renewed hope at the very least of reducing the ruling Conservative's majority as they seek to recast their campaign message in the final hours before voting as investment versus cuts.

On Sunday, May promised to review Britain's counterterrorism strategy, holding out the prospect of enhanced powers for the security services and longer prison sentences for extremists. May said she wants to take a tougher line with internet providers and social media businesses that allow extremist material on their sites.

She warned there has been far too much tolerance of extremism in Britain and promised to step up the fight against Islamist terrorism after the London Bridge attack, saying enough is enough.

British counterterror chiefs say that while Butt was investigated in 2015, he was deemed a low risk. According to Assistant Police Commissioner Mark Rowley, he had seen nothing to show that a poor decision has been made in 2015 and that police had no evidence Butt was planning anything.

Police, however, confirm they received several warnings from neighbors and associates about Butt.

British police and MI5 set up in 2013 an early warning system, known as Project Danube, to help them spot when low-priority suspects might be re-engaging in violent extremism. That program appears to have failed, say critics, as it did not help them identify Khalid Masood, the militant responsible for the Westminster Bridge attack in March that killed five people. Nor did it alert them to the Manchester Arena bomber, British-Libyan Salman Abedi.

Source: Voice of America

LONDON � Details emerged Tuesday of the three London Bridge attackers: a Pakistan-born failed customer service clerk with links to one of Europe's most prolific hate preachers, a Moroccan pastry chef whose partner said he once went swimming rather than see his daughter and an Italian national who told authorities he "wanted to be a terrorist."

At least two of the men were known to British intelligence and law enforcement officials, raising questions about whether anything could have been done to stop the attack, which began Saturday when the men drove a rented van into a crowd and then leaped out to stab people who crossed their paths. Seven were killed and nearly 50 wounded. All three of the attackers were shot dead by police.

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said it was fair to ask how the attackers "slipped through our net."

Security has become a key issue in the run-up to Thursday's general election. British security officials said none of the men was considered violent, but they acknowledged the difficulty of predicting whether extremists will turn dangerous. The assault was the third attack in three months in which most of the assailants had been on authorities' radar at some point.

As the investigation expanded to look at how the men knew one another and whether they were part of a larger conspiracy, Pakistani intelligence authorities swooped Tuesday into the town of Jhelum, where Khurum Butt lived until the time he was 7, when he moved to Britain. His cousin, 18-year-old Bilal Dar, told The Associated Press that Butt's uncle was taken in for questioning. It was unclear if he was detained.

"Our family is hurt by what he did," Dar said in the town about two hours east of Pakistan's capital. "This has destroyed our family's pride."

Butt, 27, embraced radical Islam during his time in London and was once filmed in a documentary called "The Jihadis Next Door." In the film, he was seen with a group unfurling a black-and-white flag associated with the Islamic State group. The men were followers of Anjem Choudary, a preacher who was jailed for his support of the Islamic State and who once praised the Sept. 11 attackers.

It is thought that Choudary played a key role in Butt's radicalization, according to a British government official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the ongoing investigation. Choudary's now-banned al-Muhajiroun group was linked to one of Butt's alleged connections, Sajeel Shahid, according to the British government official who again spoke on condition of anonymity.

Shadid allegedly provided al-Qaida terror training to Mohammed Siddique Khan, one of the four suicide bombers who killed 52 people during London's morning rush hour in 2005. He was also accused of training other terror suspects in Britain.

During his time in Britain, Butt once worked for Transport of London as a customer service clerk but failed his probation after a few months on the job. He also worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken and used a gym in east London. In his spare time, he tried to recruit followers to the Islamic State group � a practice that prompted a neighbor to report him to the police in 2015.

He was one of about 3,000 suspects who were known to British authorities but not part of 500 active investigations.

"The problem occurs when we know someone is moving in extremist circles but we don't have evidence to indicate that they are plotting an attack," said the British government official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "That's where the question of resources comes into play."

Police identified the second attacker as 30-year-old Rachid Redouane, also known as Rachid Elkhdar, who claimed to have both Moroccan and Libyan roots and worked as a pastry chef in Ireland, where he had lived in the past five years as well the east London suburb of Dagenham.

He married a British woman named Charisse O'Leary, who posted on Facebook last month that Redouane was negligent in seeing their young daughter and on one planned visit, she said he told her: "I'm going swimming." The couple is thought to have split. O'Leary was one of 13 people arrested after Saturday's attacks. Twelve were later released. One man is still being held.

Redouane was never under surveillance by Irish authorities, and Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald urged caution in speculating about his movements.

The third attacker was identified as Youssef Zaghba, a 22-year-old Italian national of Moroccan descent who was reportedly working in a London restaurant.

An Italian prosecutor says Zaghba told authorities after being stopped last year at Bologna's airport that he "wanted to be a terrorist," but then quickly corrected himself.

There was not enough evidence to arrest or charge Zaghba when authorities questioned him at the Marconi airport on March 15, 2016, Bologna prosecutor Giuseppe Amato said Tuesday. Amato told Italy's Radio 24 that Zaghba was flagged to British authorities as a "possible suspect."

Zaghba was stopped while trying to take a flight to Turkey on his way to Syria, Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported Tuesday.

After that, Amato said, any time Zaghba was in Italy, he was always tracked by Italian intelligence officers.

"We did everything we could have done," he said. "But there weren't elements of proof that he was a terrorist. He was someone who was suspicious because of his way of behaving."

Italy has expelled nearly 50 people in the past two years who were suspected of extremist activities but for whom there was insufficient evidence to bring formal charges. Zaghba's Italian citizenship prevented such an expulsion, Italian daily Republica reported.

His mother said her son used to show her videos of Syria and wanted to go "because it was a place where you could live according to a pure Islam."

Valeria Collina was quoted by Italian weekly news magazine L'Espresso as saying she last spoke to her son Thursday and now realizes it was a goodbye call. She said she tried to keep him away from radical friends, but "he had the internet and from there he got everything."

Prime Minister Theresa May, who called the snap election in hopes of strengthening her mandate for discussions over Britain's exit from the European Union, has come under fire for the cuts to police numbers in recent years. A string of opinion polls over the past couple of weeks have pointed to a narrowing in the gap between her Conservative Party and the main opposition Labour Party.

The number of police officers in England and Wales fell by almost 20,000 between 2010 and 2016 � years when May, as home secretary, was in charge of policing.

The country's official terror threat level remains at "severe," one notch below the highest.

Associated Press writers Danica Kirka, Jill Lawless and Gregory Katz in London contributed to this report. Paolo Santalucia and Nicole Winfield contributed from Rome and Kathy Gannon from Pakistan.

This story has been corrected to show that one attacker used an east London gym but did not work there.

Source: Voice of America

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