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Cameron Moves to Calm Fears After Attack on Soldier Cameron Moves to Calm Fears After Attack on Soldier
(about 7 hours later)
LONDON — One day after a fatal and gruesome attack on an off-duty soldier by two knife-wielding assailants, Prime Minister David Cameron on Thursday moved to calm fears of a wider increase in terrorism, saying that Britain would be “absolutely resolute” in confronting militants and that extremist assaults would only “bring us together.” LONDON — British security officials confirmed Thursday that both suspects in the hacking death of an off-duty British soldier were known to MI5, the domestic security agency, in the years before the attack, in which men drove their car into the soldier on a busy London street and then chopped at him with cleavers as he lay prone on the sidewalk.
Coming almost eight years after Britain’s worst terror attack, when four suicide bombers killed 52 people in central London in July 2005, the attack on Wednesday, by two men identified as Britons with links to Nigeria, jarred a nation that had felt relatively secure since the authorities thwarted several successive conspiracies and brought suspects to trial. Twenty-four hours after the attack, with Britain still reeling with shock at its sheer brutality, the victim was identified as a 25-year-old army bandsman and machine-gunner, Lee Rigby, who had served in Afghanistan and was the father of a 2-year-old boy. He had left his barracks in plainclothes to visit his mother, the authorities said.
The attack, by assailants armed with weapons including a meat cleaver, took place in broad daylight, and was all the more shocking because the men were known to the security services as potential militants, British media outlets reported, raising questions about how closely they had been monitored. Security officials said the suspects were radicalized British Muslim men with family origins in Nigeria. One was named by the BBC as Michael Adebolajo, 28, who it said had been raised in a Christian family in Romford, east of London. He converted to Islam in about 2001, and joined a radical Muslim group, Al Muhajiroun, that was banned in Britain in 2010 as an Islamic terrorist organization, notorious for having praised those who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks. The other suspect was not identified by the authorities.
Speaking to reporters at 10 Downing Street, Mr. Cameron would not confirm or deny the reports. “You would not expect me to comment on this when a criminal investigation is ongoing,” he said. The two suspects in the killing were under police guard in separate London hospitals, where they were being treated for gunshot wounds inflicted by the police when they were arrested, officials said.
On Thursday, Britain’s Ministry of Defense identified the dead soldier as Lee Rigby, 25, a ceremonial military drummer and machine gunner with a unit known as the Corps of Drums who joined the army in 2006 and served in Britain, Cyprus, Germany and, in 2009, in Helmand Province in Afghanistan. Most recently, he had worked with a recruiting post and at the Tower of London. The ministry said he had a 2-year-old son. Meanwhile, Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism unit mounted raids on Thursday on six residential addresses that were said to have been linked to the attackers, including one in Romford, one in the London suburb of Greenwich and a third in the Lincolnshire village of Saxilby, 150 miles north of London, where neighbors said some of Mr. Adebolajo’s family members were living in a large, modern home on a new housing estate. Scotland Yard said the raids had led to the arrests of a man and a woman, both 29, whom they would not name, who were suspected of conspiracy to commit murder.
The BBC quoted unnamed sources as identifying one of the suspects as Michael Adebolajo, 28, who had converted to Islam after leaving college in 2001. He had been raised in a devout Christian family and was considered “bright and witty” in college. New details of the attack in the southeast London neighborhood of Woolwich on Wednesday compounded the sense of outrage felt in Britain at the savage attack.
Immediately after the attack, which took place in the Woolwich area of south London, one of the assailants gave an impromptu and macabre interview to a passer-by in a cellphone video; Mr. Rigby’s body can be seen lying in the street nearby. In the video, the assailant — believed to be Mr. Adebolajo, according to the BBC — said he had carried out the attack because British soldiers were killing Muslims overseas every day, an apparent reference to the international military mission in Afghanistan. The killers were described as having rained blows on the inert soldier before dragging his corpse into the street, roaming around and waving off would-be helpers with bloodied hands, cleavers still in their grasp, apparently intent on keeping the body on public display until the police arrived. One of the two men was caught on cellphone video warning bystanders that they, too, would not be safe until British soldiers were withdrawn from all Muslim lands.
The BBC account said one of the two suspects was “intercepted” by the police last year while he was preparing to leave Britain, but did not explain why. The sources were also quoted as saying that it was “not accurate” to say, as some broadcast accounts in Britain suggested, that both suspects had featured in several investigations in recent years. One witness who spoke to the BBC said that the police had opened fire when one of the two attackers, cleaver still in hand, appeared to rush the officers.
Mr. Rigby, who was not in uniform as he walked near a military barracks, was rammed by a car, according to witness accounts in British media, and then hacked to death, with some witnesses saying he was beheaded. One of his attackers shouted “God is great” during the attack, government officials said. The attack appeared to bear some of the hallmarks of “lone wolf” terrorist attacks like the one last month at the Boston Marathon. Involving low-tech weapons and a spontaneity aimed at foiling pre-emptive discovery, they have been propagated in recent years by an array of Islamic militant Web sites that Western security experts have linked to Al Qaeda.
Britain has suffered more than any other country in Northern Europe from Islamic terrorist plots in recent years, and has worked assiduously to prevent more. Security officials have said that at any given time they are tracking hundreds of young men in extremist networks. Such attacks have been urged as a means of striking back at Western nations, particularly Britain and the United States, in the face of their success in disrupting terrorist networks with high-technology tools, including drones and satellite- and computer-aided surveillance systems.
But small-scale attacks like Wednesday’s can be hard to prevent, and it raised worries about a new style of terrorism involving direct assaults on individuals rather than bombings of buildings or airplanes. The SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadi Web sites, distributed a posting from one on Wednesday after the London killing. Dating from July 2011, the message on Shumukh al-Islam, a militant Web site that has been linked to Al Qaeda, urges followers to mount “lone-wolf operations” that might include beheadings. After hurrying back to London overnight from a European tour, Prime Minister David Cameron suggested in a statement to reporters that the country should emulate the example of Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, 48, a French-born Cub Scout leader whose actions at the site of the killing earned her hero’s plaudits in the morning newspapers.
Nigeria has a large Muslim population and has been wrestling with Islamic militancy and homegrown terror groups that have links with Al Qaeda. But there was no immediate suggestion that the men had ties to Boko Haram, a prominent militant group locked in a fierce contest with the Nigerian military. In broadcast interviews, Ms. Loyau-Kennett said she had gotten off a passing bus when she saw a body lying in the street, intending to offer first aid. Instead, she said, she came face to face with one of the killers, and kept him discussing motives in a successful bid to distract him until the police arrived.
Police officers, who said they arrived on the scene within 14 minutes, shot and wounded the suspects. They were taken to separate hospitals under police guard, one in serious condition. The hunt for clues about the motives and background of the assailants triggered a broad dragnet, the police said, with officers in Lincolnshire, 150 miles north of London, searching a house in the town of Saxilby. “When told by the attacker that he wanted to start a war in London, she replied, ‘You’re going to lose. It’s only you versus many,’ ” Mr. Cameron said.
“The people who did this were trying to divide us,” Mr. Cameron told reporters outside 10 Downing Street after a meeting of the high-level Cobra national security committee. “They should know something like this will only bring us together and make us stronger.” He added, “She spoke for us all.”
“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.” There was a growing concern that Britain’s security services, after a long chapter of success in disrupting more complex terrorist plots since the transit system bombings in London that killed 52 people and the four bombers on July 7, 2005, may have missed opportunities to head off the Woolwich attack.
A statement on Thursday from the Defense Ministry said a number of additional security measures had been put in place, but it did not elaborate. In that sense, the Boston Marathon bombings again provided a point of reference, in that the older of the two brothers accused of carrying out the bombings, and some of his associates, had drawn the attention of the F.B.I. and other American authorities before the bombings in Boston.
ITV News showed a video taken with a cellphone at the scene in Woolwich in which a man who appears to be in his 20s or early 30s holds a cleaver in one of his bloodied hands. He offers what seems to be a political message before the police arrive. What British security officials knew about the two men held after the London attack remained unclear. But unidentified officials who spoke with British reporters said that both men had appeared on lists of people known to have been involved with Islamic militant groups that have been under surveillance by agencies, including MI5, that form the front line in Britain’s counterterrorist operations.
“I apologize that women had to see this today, but in our lands women have to see the same thing,” he says. “You people will never be safe. Remove your governments! They don’t care about you.” In his Downing Street statement, Mr. Cameron acknowledged that news coverage of the killing in Britain had included “the point that the two suspects in this horrific attack were known to the security services,” but that he could not comment on the continuing investigation. But he added that “in the normal practice in these sorts of cases,” the actions of the security agencies involved would be open to review by two bodies that have formal powers in such matters, the Independent Police Complaints Commission, in the case of Scotland Yard, and a parliamentary body, the Intelligence and Security Committee, in the case of MI5 and MI6, which is the foreign intelligence agency.
He then refers to what appears to be a motive for the attack, saying it was carried out “because of what’s going on in our own countries.” Security officials were quoted by the BBC as confirming that Mr. Adebolajo, one of the two suspects in the killing, had come under surveillance in recent years when he attended meetings of Al Muhajiroun, the militant group that was later banned.
Mayor Boris Johnson of London rejected that argument, saying it was wrong to link the killing with British foreign policy or the actions of Britain’s military, which has been closely allied with the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq. The former leader of that group, Anjem Choudary, said in a BBC interview that Mr. Adebolajo had been a regular attendee — “very quiet, very unassuming, very nonviolent” — and that others at the meetings had known him by the pseudonym of Brother Mujahid, an Arabic term that means holy warrior.
“The fault lies wholly and exclusively in the warped and deluded mind-set of the people who did it,” he said. He said Mr. Adebolajo had stopped attending meetings a few years ago, shortly before the group was banned.
Organizations representing Britain’s two and a half million Muslims were quick to condemn the attack. “No cause justifies this murder,” the Muslim Council of Britain said in a statement on behalf of the network of mosques, schools and charities it represents. It described the killing as a “barbaric act that has no basis in Islam,” and added that the “vast majority of British Muslims acknowledge the armed forces for the work they do.” British security experts noted that several of the militants involved in the 2005 transit bombings had been known to MI5 for years before the attacks, but that MI5 officers had reviewed their cases and decided that they were peripheral figures, apparently not involved in terrorist plotting.
The assault took place near a busy junction a short walk from the London headquarters of the Royal Artillery, a unit that has deployed soldiers, including tank units, to Iraq and Afghanistan. A primary school is nearby and witnesses said some of those who had seen the attack were parents and children returning home. The decision not to keep track of those men, the experts said, may prove to have been similar to the case of Mr. Adebolajo.
A small blue car — apparently the vehicle used to ram the victim — appeared to have hit a telephone pole after mounting the sidewalk. Photographs and television footage from the scene showed extensive damage to the car’s hood and windshield. Witnesses said two men had gotten out of the car and attacked Mr. Rigby with large bladed weapons. MI5 officials have said repeatedly that despite a substantial increase in the agency’s financing and manpower since 2005, it has the resources to actively monitor at any one time only a fraction of the militants who have drawn the agency’s attention.
Some said Mr. Rigby had been wearing a T-shirt with the words Help for Heroes, the name of a charity that supports some of the thousands of British military personnel who have returned wounded from Afghanistan and Iraq and the families of the more than 600 servicemen and women who have been killed in those conflicts.

John F. Burns reported from London, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

A man who said he had seen the entire attack told the BBC that the assailants had lingered at the scene, talking to passers-by about what they had done. He said a policewoman with a handgun fired at the two suspects after one of them rushed toward a group of police officers.
Other witnesses said a man had leapt from an unmarked car and aimed a handgun at the assailants, shouting to pedestrians to clear the area.

John F. Burns reported from London and Alan Cowell from Paris. Stephen Castle contributed reporting from London.