19:02

More from Nosheen Iqbal in Stoke:

Outside Khan’s family home, where his parents lived, nobody was answering the door but half a dozen young Muslim men were gathered in the cold, rebuffing reporters from the BBC and Daily Mail.

“Why are they hanging here?” Mahmood, a taxi driver, was incensed by the group. “They’re just hanging about in the streets and when they’re hanging about like that people think they’re gangs. Then they act like gangs and get into drugs and extremism,” he speculated.

“These are awara boys, awara means loafer, layabout, good for nothing. That’s one problem with young boys when they leave school and have no hope in life. It makes some of them easy to brainwash into drugs and extremism – they are both the same thing to me. Dangerous. Bad. If you’re taking drugs or a criminal, it’s easier to become an extremist I think.”

Two streets down, Mr Rehman, who has children the same age as Khan, said locals were still processing what had happened. “Yesterday, this was something that happened in London. It wasn’t until 2am that people found out in the news that there were links to Staffordshire; when I woke up, [reports] said Khan had come from here? No he didn’t, he wasn’t living here.” The community wasn’t in denial, he said, but everyone was feeling “very sensitive”.

How was the community feeling towards the Khan family? “Look, it’s shameful,” he said. “But people feel sorry for the family. No one wants to get involved and put any blame on the parents, everyone knows it’s not their fault. Some kids become uncontrollable, what are they supposed to do?”

The Khan family originate from Mirpur, in Azad Kashmir, which has grown to become the largest city in the region and is known as “Little England” – much of the modern buildings, several storey homes and restaurants in recent decades have been built by the British Mirpuri expat community.