The police have identified the “Midlands Man” who drove into a gaggle of cyclists and pedestrians, and then into a security barrier, outside Parliament in London yesterday. The news is unsurprising, if it’s even news at all.
He was a Muslim.
He was a Sudanese immigrant.
The media provided all the usual lachrymose details of his sad life.
“A Very Good Person”
According to the police, the man who drove the car into the crowd, injuring three while fortuitously not killing anyone, is Salih Khater, 29, a Sudanese man whom the Washington Post insisted on calling a “Briton.”
Of course, he isn’t a “Briton,” citizenship papers regardless, but he is something of a nutter, if the profile in the Daily Mail is to be believed.
As is typical with these terror attacks, the media rushed to explain why the maniac wanted to kill, beginning with the usual locution: No one ever imagined such a quiet boy could do such a thing.
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According to the Mail:
The Westminster terror suspect’s family today said he is a “normal person” as it was revealed he told friends he was going to London for a Sudanese visa so he could holiday in the country he fled as a refugee.
Salih Khater’s brother Abdullah insists he is no a religious fanatic and said they are all in a “state of shock” about his sibling’s carborne rampage outside the Houses of Parliament at 7.30 a.m. yesterday morning.
Khater told friends he was driving down for a visa appointment at Sudan’s embassy in St James’ Park — less than a mile away from Westminster — to avoid early morning traffic.
But police believe he cruised the capital for six hours before deliberately plowing through crowds of cyclists and pedestrians before careering into terror-proof security barriers.
Why anyone would vacation in the country they were, supposedly, forced to flee is anyone’s guess.
Khater landed in Britain eight years ago, quickly becoming a citizen.
While Khater was not, apparently, on Britain’s terror list, a clue to his rage might be this: “The Home Office had recently told him he was being investigated over ‘irregularities’ in his citizenship application.”
The Mail also reported that police seized a computer Khater used the night before the attack.
But Khater really was a regular guy:
He settled in Birmingham where he was described as a quiet loner who loved Aston Villa, Celine Dion, smoking shisha and whiling away time at an internet cafe below his old flat in the Sparkhill area of Birmingham.
Friends said he was devastated when his brother and father died recently, reportedly in a car crash.
In another blow he was studying accountancy at Coventry University until May but had his place “terminated” after failing the first year, while friends said his poor English meant he couldn’t complete a pharmacy course 12 months earlier.
Local Muslim chieftains, the Mail reported, assured everyone that Khater was not a radical or even religious:
Massar Mahmood, a trustee of Birmingham’s Central Mosque, said: “From our own inquries at the Mosque and from people of a similar background in the Sudan community he has shown no sign of doing any harm to anyone.”
He said: “There is no sign that he had been radicalised. He was not a fervent worshipper and had not shown any signs of that.
“As far as we know, he was trying to get a visa. He went the night before and presume he spent the time there travelling round to wait to visit the embassy.”
We also learned that he was “very sociable and stable” and “a very good person.”
They always are.
Second Attack at Parliament
As The New American noted in its first report on the car terrorist, this is the second attack in less than 18 months near Parliament.
In March last year, a British-born Muslim convert, Khalid Masood, smashed into pedestrians and stabbed a policeman on Westminster Bridge, killing five and injuring 50 before police shot him to death.
Khater lives just 10 minutes from Masood’s former home.
Masood’s maniacal mass-murder attempt presaged another bridge attack. Three terrorists connected to the Islamic State drove into pedestrians on London Bridge in June 2017, then raced to Borough Market to stab and slash anyone they could. Police shot those men dead, too, and found them wearing fake bombs.
That May, a suicide bomber detonated explosives at an Ariana Grande concert, killing 22.
The latest attack seems to prove that Britain is simply unable to cope with the massive influx of immigrants the Labour Party imported into the country to change its demographics, beginning in about 2004.
In 2014, former Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw confessed that the move had been an “spectacular mistake” given that the leftist architects of the plan didn’t expect more than a million foreigners to show up and reap the benefits of Britain’s socialist welfare state.
Britons paid again for that mistake yesterday.
Photo: AP Images
