Excerpt:
This week's terror attack in London by a single attacker which killed four people, was definitely not as well coordinated and deadly as the July 7, 2005 bombings that killed 52 people and injured over 700 in the British capital, but it stirred up the same sense of unease among British citizens as the 7/7 violence.
In the past decade, Britain has witnessed a rise in Islamic extremism; hence it was understandable that many people expressed concern about another possible wave of Islamist attacks in the UK. A spate of attacks in Belgium, France and German has added to that fear.
British authorities identified the London attacker as Khalid Masood, a 52-year-old British-born Muslim convert born in the south east, English county of Kent. Masood had recently lived in Birmingham, which commentators and researchers say has become a breeding ground for Muslim extremists. Masood had also spent time in Saudi Arabia between 2005 and 2015 but was not on the radar of the country's security agencies, according to the Saudi embassy in London.