In an old school photograph, the smiling face of Adrian Ajao is a picture of a healthy, happy, middle class boy from Tunbridge Wells. Beaming with satisfaction after a football marathon, he stood on the cusp of a fruitful life.

What led that bright, sporty, popular teenager to become the Islamic State-inspired killer responsible for the attack on parliament this week confounds those who knew him then and is now the focus of a urgent and sprawling investigation by the security services.

“He was a smashing guy, really nice chap,” said Stuart Knight, an old classmate at Huntleys school. “The picture of us in the football team was after we did a 24-hour sponsored football match to raise money for the sports hall. We would have been about 14 years old. Everyone got on with Adrian, he was a lovely bloke.”

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But there are themes running through the life of Adrian Ajao, who was born as Adrian Elms and who died as Khalid Masood that help explain what went so terribly wrong and turned that “lovely bloke” into the most murderous terrorist in Britain since 2005.

They include a shifting identity and a conviction, perhaps paranoid, that he was an outsider as the black child born out of marriage in the 1960s to a teenage white mother in Kent. He seemed to simmer with resentment and anger, which exploded repeatedly throughout his life in violent episodes involving knives. It was a toxic combination that found its most deadly outlet when he embraced Islamic extremism in its most violent form.

Born in Hainault maternity hospital in Erith, his mother Janet Elms was 17 when she gave birth and brought him up alone, until she met and married Philip Ajao two years later and moved to Tunbridge Wells. His two younger brothers were born in the genteel town, and the family lived in St James Park among big Victorian villas. His mother attended the local church.

“They seemed quite pleasant, just a normal family,” recalled a neighbour.

“He had a big personality and everyone liked him,” said former classmate Kenton Till. “He was very bright and very good at chemistry. I think he wanted to do something like that after he left school.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ajao with fellow pupils, and a teacher, at Huntleys school. Photograph: Huntleys school

According to Till he was known among his peers as Black Ade, a nickname that barely masked underlying racism. When he left school at 16, he lost touch with classmates and began to be drawn into the life of petty crime.

“I remember he came to a new year’s party at my house but he was with a group of lads who were drunk and on something and my parents asked them to leave,” said Tills. “After that we sort of lost touch.”

By 18, Ajao was into dealing drugs and had a notched up a conviction for criminal damage. He later skipped town with a string of debts in his wake, former friends recalled. One said he was at one point a “heavy cocaine” user who managed to hold down a job at Woolworths.

At 28, Ajao met Jane Harvey and tried to get his life back on track. The couple had a daughter in 1992 and moved to rural Sussex in search of the tranquillity. They lived in a four-bedroom detached house with a large garden in Northiam, a village near Rye, east Sussex.

He found a job in a nearby chemical company, which supplied cleaning fluids to hotels and restaurants, and began studying for a university degree. He set up his own business – but his feelings of alienation and resentment appeared to grow.

“He was very intelligent but always slightly sinister,” said Alice Williams, who knew him while landlady of the Rose and Crown pub near Rye. “He would do the Telegraph crossword and, to be fair, would make intelligent conversation but he was a bit racist. He always had a chip on his shoulder.”

In 2000 his parents, the stability in his life, moved to west Wales, where they bought a farm and his mother started making handmade cushions and bags from her farmhouse kitchen. While they settled into a rural life, their son’s attempt at country living came to a violent end.

One night in the Crown and Thistle pub in Northiam, Ajao flew into a row with a local, Piers Mott.

Leaving the pub, he used a knife that he had been using to decorate his daughter’s bedroom and slashed the seat covers on Mott’s car, shouting and gesticulating as he did so. When Mott came out Ajao cut him across the face, leaving a three inch gash on his cheek.

He was charged with unlawful wounding and possession of an unlawful weapon. He was ostracised. Ajao’s lawyer told the court: “It is a very small community and his wife and family have been extremely affected by this. He will effectively have to move his family from the village and start to live his life all over again.”

That new life was prison. Ajao pleaded guilty and was jailed for two years serving his sentence, it is understood, in Wayland prison in Norfolk.

Judge Charles Kemp told him: “The reality is that you lost your temper and went beyond the bounds of what is reasonable.”

In September 2003, by now living in Eastbourne, he was jailed again, this time for six months for attacking a man with a knife, again in the face, outside a nursing home in the town.

This time the prison culture was different. In the wake of the 11 September attacks many British extremists were in jail under new terror laws and the prison system played host to the radicalisation of new recruits. Targets for conversion were often young men with violent backgrounds struggling with their identities – men like Ajao.

Within months of emerging from prison, he had met and married a young Muslim woman working as a marketing assistant, Farzana Malik.

It seems to have been a turning point. Marriage records show he used his birth name Adrian Russell Elms but his identity was about to shift once more and Adrian Ajao, aka Elms, became Khalid Masood.

A CV he reportedly circulated until last year recorded that in the same year he was married he earned a qualification to teach English as a foreign language under the Tesol programme. It would be his passport to Saudi Arabia.

Turning 40, his first stop was reportedly Yanbu, a Red Sea town about 40 miles from Medina – the burial place of the prophet Muhammad. He took a post teaching English to workers at the General Authority of Civil Aviation in Jeddah. He also taught in Jubail on the east coast.

Going to Saudi Arabia to teach English is a common path for converts, according to security sources. It remains unknown if he was radicalised here.

By 2009 he was back in the UK and in Luton, Bedfordshire, where according to his CV he joined a language college as a senior English teacher, supervising seven other staff.

He lived at two addresses in 2010 and 2011 in the Bury Park area in the north west of town. Racial and religious tensions were running high as the now banned radical Islamic group Al Mahajaroun clashed with the far right English Defence League, which was formed in Luton. He lived with Rohey Hydara a 29-year-old Gambian women believed to be his wife, and according to one neighbour, two young children. It is not known when, or if, he divorced Malik.



Neighbours’ memories of him vary. Teacher Katie Garricques, 48, said he was “always polite” and “frequently gardening or mowing his lawn”. But another neighbour, who declined to be named, described him as “like a shadow” moving around at night in black Islamic dress and a black beanie hat.

At some point after his radicalisation he came to the attention of MI5 but he was barely even the “peripheral figure” that Theresa May described earlier this week.

He also called himself Khalid Choudary. Leaders at Luton Central mosque said they weren’t familiar with him and condemned the attacks, saying in a statement: “We remain united with our friends and neighbours in our sincere endeavour to oppose all those who seek to harm us.”

Around 2013, they moved to a two-storey terrace house in the Forest Gate area of east London, and stayed for three years, according to one neighbour, attending the local mosque.

The mosque and madrasah is run by the Al-Tawid Trust and has more than 1,000 attendees a week. It said on Friday that “it is conceivable that he may have prayed here on the odd occasion, however he is not a known regular attendee”.

The couple were also registered at a nearby recently built flat on the site of the Olympic Park, which was raided by police on Thursday. Vera Amade, a 21-year-old mother of two, told reporters on Friday that he “was very pleasant … always dressed in a suit” and “used to come back from work at about five or six”.

His last regular home – at least his 14th – was in Winson Green, Birmingham. Neighbours who knew him since he arrived last year described a “split personality”. Anna Goras, 32, told reporters he gave her children lifts to school but “his face would change in a moment and his eyes would go hard and look evil”.

She told the Sun: “He often went off about how British people didn’t bring up their kids right and sent them to poor standard schools.

“I am a Catholic and he had a go at me saying the school I sent my children to was rubbish and not as good as Muslim schools.”

Another said his black clothes and habit of going out at night made him seem “a bit like a vampire”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Picture of Khalid Masood distributed by the Metropolitan police’s counter terrorism command. Photograph: AP

Before the attack he was drawn back to the south coast and booked into the £60-a-night Preston Park hotel in Brighton. Businessman Michael Petersen recalled encountering him at reception “very white teeth, smiling, articulate, polite”. He was “laughing and joking, telling us stories about where he lived” recalled manager Sabeur Toumi. In fact he was hours from committing the worst terrorist atrocity in Britain since 2005, which left four other people dead and more than 50 injured.

Hundreds of miles away in west Wales, his mother remained behind the closed doors of her farmhouse being guarded by police. Like his school friends, she too was surely wrestling the horror that her child had killed four people. Officers said she did not want to comment. Her husband was in hospital and not very well. One neighbour said: “Janet’s done nothing wrong and this must be hell for her.”