It was a simple rack of leaflets that gave away the role of the Westminster attacker in one of Britain’s most hardline mosques.
Khalid Masood was a public contact person for calltoislam.com, until last week the main website of the Luton Islamic Centre mosque.
Masood’s name, a phone number that The Sunday Times has confirmed as his, and the calltoislam.com web address appear on stickers attached to leaflets on display at the mosque. One of the leaflets was picked up from the mosque’s lobby by a reporter for this paper.
Masood’s mobile number was identified through analysis of the WhatsApp messaging service, which the killer used until minutes before his attack. The disclosure of the link to the mosque casts new light on suggestions that Masood, who killed five people, had no connections to radical groups.
The mosque insists that it condemns terrorism. But material it publishes is extreme.
Sermons available until last week on calltoislam.com, and branded with its logo, urged worshippers to “make ready . . . steeds of war (ie weapons) to threaten the enemy of Allah . . . We ask Allah that he grant us the ability to pursue the proper means for gaining victory over the Jews and over the rest of the enemies of Islam.”
In another sermon — published on calltoislam.com and delivered at the mosque — its imam, Abdul Qadir Baksh, also known as Abu Saifillah, attacked the government for “scheming” against Muslims, saying: “Brothers and sisters, it is high time you all woke up and understand this government is creating a form of Islam in this country . . . which not just integrates with the disbelieving society but simulates it.
“At the moment the buzzwords are ‘integration’, ‘the wider community’, ‘breaking down barriers’ and so on. In the end it will be concentration camps, massacres and plunder.”
Baksh attacked “Jews and the Christians” for their “greed, jealousy and fornication”.
Elas UK in Luton, an English-language school where Masood taught, was a project of the Luton Islamic Centre. The school’s general director at the time was Baksh. Another director was Farasat Latif, the mosque’s secretary.
Elas UK’s website, retrieved through a web archive, describes it as a “branch” of the Ethnic Minority Training Project, a charity run by Baksh and others that has received at least £75,000 of public money, including sums for “preventing violent radicalisation”.
Haras Rafiq, head of the UK’s foremost anti-extremism think tank, the Quilliam Foundation, said that security officials believe Masood was radicalised while a worshipper at the mosque.
Rafiq said: “The fact that people like this could be given public money for counter-extremism work shows how wrong the authorities were getting it at the time.”
In his role as a former director of the school, Latif insisted in media interviews last month that Masood “did not fit to me as a potential extremist in any way, shape or form”. But he did not mention his or Masood’s role at the mosque.
Latif refused to comment on the leaflets or Masood last week, telling a reporter to “piss off.”
Over more than a week the mosque repeatedly refused to deny that Masood was a worshipper. It later claimed he was not and that the sticker had been placed on the leaflet by The Sunday Times “in order to defame us”. The mosque subsequently took calltoislam.com offline but it is still available on web archives.