Police are investigating whether a terror suspect travelled through the night from Birmingham to stake out Westminster for more than an hour and a half before mowing down cyclists outside the Houses of Parliament, it emerged on Tuesday night.

The 29-year-old man, named as Salih Khater who is believed to be of Sudanese origin, waited until rush hour before swerving on to the wrong side of the road and hitting cyclists who were waiting at the traffic lights. He then crashed into barriers outside the entrance to the House of Lords.

The man, who is a UK national, had driven from his home in Birmingham before allegedly using his car as a weapon, sparking suggestions that it was an attempted "copycat" of the attack launched by Khalid Masood a year earlier which had killed six people.

Masood had lived just ten minutes from the suspect's home in the Sparkbrook area of Birmingham, before travelling to London to carry out his attack. Security sources are keen to establish if there is a connection between the pair.

Scotland Yard said the man was not known to counter terror police nor MI5.