Counter-terrorism teams are searching a property amid claims that a Briton staged a suicide bomb attack on a prison in Syria.

Officers are examining a house in Langley Green, Crawley, West Sussex, belonging to Abdul Waheed Majeed, after reports that a UK jihadi carried out the deadly bombing last week.

The al-Qaida-linked Jabhat al-Nusra identified the suicide attacker only using his nom de guerre, Abu Suleiman al-Britani.

The 41-year-old is claimed to have driven a lorry into a jail in Aleppo and detonated a bomb, allowing scores of prisoners to escape from the building – a claim denied by the Syrian government. Footage of the truck, adapted with armour plating, has emerged in the past few days showing it being paraded before it was blown up beside the prison complex.

The attack is understood to be the first time a Briton has staged a suicide attack in the war-torn state, where increasing numbers of UK-born extremists have gone to fight.

Mohammad Jamil, left, the uncle of Abdul Waheed Majeed, and Arif Syed, who is representing the family in Crawley. Photograph: Tom Pugh/PA

Thames Valley police, who lead counter-terrorism operations for the region, said the Crawley search on Martyrs Avenue was "part of our inquiry following the suicide bombing in Syria".

In Crawley, neighbours said the two-storey, end-of-terrace property being searched by police was previously home to a notorious child murderer, Roy Whiting, who killed eight-year-old Sarah Payne in 2000.

Arif Syed, a Crawley man who is representing the family, told reporters that Majeed was a married father of three who left Britain six months ago, telling his family in August that he was going on a humanitarian mission to Syria. He would phone or Skype his family every three days, but communication was lost with him about seven days ago. Syed, 59, said he hoped to learn that Majeed was not behind the attack in Aleppo. He said: "We are praying that he will walk through the door. It's a good possibility that he's still alive and well, and is just not communicating.

"We live with this hope until the authorities confirm, or we get eyewitnesses that say it was him. We strongly hope and believe that he is alive and well, and that he will join his family."

His uncle, Mohammad Jamil, 65, said Majeed, who was born and bred in Crawley and worked as a highways contractor, had never shown any sign of extremism. He said: "If the family knew about this, we would not have let him go."

Syed said the police had informed the family that they could not confirm through their intelligence that Majeed was definitely responsible for the bombing.

He said: "The family has been in constant touch with him for several weeks, and he has been sending photographs.

"He has mostly been working with a charity on the refugee camps and distributing aid which he has collected from here and other towns in the UK. He was quite happy and enjoying this piece of work. We had communication until about seven days ago.

"He had said he was going to another camp and there might be switch-off with the communication, which has happened before.

"He said: 'If I don't contact you for a few days, don't worry about it, I will be in touch again.' That's the last communication we had."

The Foreign Office said it could not confirm the identity of the bomber, nor that a Briton was involved.

"We are aware of these reports but we cannot confirm them," a Foreign Office spokesman said, noting that Britain had no consular presence in Syria.

Ahsan Ahmedi, president of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, based in Langley Green, Crawley, told the Crawley and Horley Observer that he had met Majeed on a few occasions. "I didn't know him personally but I met him a couple of times because when we did a promotion of our faith, he used to come out with his friends to oppose our view because we were too liberal for him."

As the civil war has dragged on UK security services have grown increasingly concerned about the trend of young Britons travelling to Syria to train to fight with jihadi groups and the potential that they could return and stage attacks on UK soil. In November, the Guardian confirmed that a man in his early 20s from west London, Mohammed el-Araj, had become the second Briton named and confirmed as dead while fighting in the civil war. Araj spent 18 months in prison for violently protesting outside the Israeli embassy in London in 2009, and was killed in Syria in mid-August, his family said.

Last week the UK's most senior terrorism prosecutor, Sue Hemming, said Britons who travelled to fight in Syria against Bashar al-Assad could face life sentences under terrorism offences on their return to the UK.

"We will look at the facts in each case, but ultimately it is potentially an offence and if it's right to prosecute then we will.

"The message for people who are considering going out there and getting involved in terrorist training or getting involved in the conflict is that they will be potentially breaking the law in this country," Hemming said.

The King's-College-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) has said it has documented hundreds of British and European nationals who have travelled to Syria to fight against Assad's forces.

Shiraz Maher from the ICSR said the government needed to adapt itself to the changing situation in order to combat Brits travelling out to fight in Syria.

"The Home Office is currently using all the wrong tools to combat the rise in foreign fighters, such as stripping people of their citizenship or revoking their passports. What it must urgently do is recalibrate the Prevent strategy to address, and damp down, the very real concerns some young Muslims have over Syria," he said.