LONDON: Khalid Masood, the 52-year-old Briton behind this week´s terror attack on parliament, had a history of violence and was once investigated by the security services for potential extremism.Police said the rampage that left four people dead in London was religiously motivated, and people who knew Masood in recent years described him as religious.Known by “a number of aliases”, including his birth name Adrian Russell Ajao, he had a string of convictions –although none of them were terror-related.Born on Christmas Day 1964 in Kent in southeast England, Masood had been living in the central English city of Birmingham, where armed police have raided several properties since Wednesday´s attack.He was brought up in the town of Rye, on the southern English coast, although his mother and step-father have since moved to Welsh-speaking west Wales, according to news reports.Masood lived in several places in southern and central England over the years, working for 12 years at a cleaning chemicals company in southern England, according to The Sun newspaper.The tabloid reported that he also worked as an English teacher, first in Saudi Arabia, where he lived between 2005 and 2009, and later in his own tutoring business in Birmingham.He had a violent streak: between 1983 and 2003 he racked up convictions for grievous bodily harm, possession of offensive weapons and public order offences, according to police.British media said he also went by the alias Adrian Elms—a name he used in 2000 when he was sentenced to two years in jail for slashing a man´s face in the Sussex village of Northiam, not far from where he grew up.Prime Minister Theresa May said that he was once investigated by British domestic spy agency MI5 in relation to “concerns about violent extremism”, but was not part of the current “intelligence picture”.
