So we now know that Khalid Masood, the 52-year-old Briton who carried out the Westminster attack in London, had a string of criminal convictions. His first was in 1983 for criminal damage and his last was in 2003 for a stabbing. He was also a convert to Islam. Neither fact should come as a surprise.

Attackers apparently inspired by Islamic extremist ideologies are, for all their righteous rage at others, rarely particularly puritanical in their personal lives. A man who earlier this month seized an automatic weapon from a police officer at Orly airport in Paris had traces of cocaine in his blood and a long criminal record, while the attacker who killed 86 in Nice last July had a history of heavy drinking, cannabis use and casual sex. Several key members of the network which killed 140 in Paris in November 2015 had been involved in drug and arms sales. Almost every high profile attack in Europe – and many in the UK - in recent years has involved someone convicted for petty or serious crime.

There has long been a link between criminality and Islamic radicalism. One of the men who killed the off-duty soldier Lee Rigby in 2013 in south-east London had served time as a young offender for his role in a crack ring. Richard Reid, who tried to detonate a bomb in his shoe on a transatlantic flight in 2001, was a juvenile delinquent.

The proportion of Islamic militants with criminal backgrounds has been rising over recent years. One reason is that Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (Isis), which established its new caliphate in 2014, offers adventure, camaraderie, violence, excitement, relative comfort, cash rewards and even sexual opportunity in a way which contrasts dramatically with the asceticism of previous militant groups like al-Qaeda.

A young man from Dortmund or Lyon or Sheffield could thus expect much that a gang back home offered but repackaged. Violence was no longer wrongdoing but resistance, and even redemption. The extremist’s selective teaching of religious texts encouraged former criminals to see themselves as washed of former sins by their commitment to jihad.

The one surprising fact about the London attacker is that most recruits were between 23 and 28 years old. Some were teenagers. There is no evidence that Masood, so much older, has been involved in criminal activity in recent years. Indeed, reports of his unstable, punchy, pub-going persona a decade or so ago are in stark contrast with neighbours’ description of his “devout” and “quiet” lifestyle recently.

It appears likely that Masood formally converted to Islam. We don’t know exactly when but in 2000 he was possibly called Adrian Elms and was jailed for two years.



Conversion often occurs in the context of another life-changing experience – such as imprisonment, a new relationship, job or voyage. In 2004 Masood, then aged 40, married an apparently Muslim woman. He reportedly worked as a teacher in Saudi Arabia between 2005 and 2009. So it looks like conversion came between eight and 13 years before his attacks.

A disproportionately high number of militants involved in plots in the west have been converts. In the UK between 2001 and 2013, 12% of “homegrown jihadists” were converts, but less than 4% of the overall Muslim population were. In the US, the total in 2015 was 40%, against an overall level of 23%.

There is little systematic research but conversion appears to precede any interest in radicalism in most cases. The most likely scenario therefore is that Masood’s personal journey to extremist violence depended on social media, radical websites, and informal networks of like-minded activists, combined with external events in the Middle East or twists in his personal life. A real decision to participate in violence – to kill and be killed as a “martyr”– could have come quite suddenly, and quite recently.

This is a trajectory which has become wearily familiar to terrorism analysts in recent years. A picture published of Masood in his school football team will inevitably prompt surprise that a man who killed with a car and a knife in Westminster could appear so ordinary, even as a youth decades before his atrocious acts. But any surprise is misplaced. Most terrorists, like most people, are anything but exceptional. Murderers, on the whole, are ordinary men.