Moroccan-born Italian was flagged on terrorism database after he was stopped while trying to travel to Syria in 2016

The third London Bridge attacker, Moroccan-born Italian Youssef Zaghba, 22, was flagged on an international terrorism database after he was stopped while trying to travel to Syria and told officials: “I am going to be a terrorist,” it has been claimed.

Zaghba moved from his father’s home country of Morocco to Italy with his Italian mother, and in 2016 he tried to travel from Bologna airport to Syria via Istanbul in order to join Islamic State.

His mother said he had been radicalised by material on the internet and that Khuram Butt and Rachid Redouane, the other two attackers who killed seven people on London Bridge and in Borough Market on Saturday night, were his friends.

Counter-terrorism police were searching apartments in and around Bologna. Raids took place at the homes of friends and relatives of the attacker, including the house of one of his ex-girlfriends, who is from Libya and lives near Bologna.

In March 2016 when Zaghba first tried to get to Syria, he was challenged by officials after he became agitated as he approached the check-in desk at Bologna airport. He told them: “I am going to be a terrorist,” according to reports in the Italian press, citing security sources. His passport and phone were impounded. Propaganda videos and religious sermons found on the phone appeared to confirm his intent to join Isis.

He was investigated but not charged, and soon afterwards he moved to east London where he is understood to have taken a job in a Pakistani restaurant.

After he was stopped at Bologna airport, details about him were uploaded to a Europe-wide database of potential jihadis, although Scotland Yard said in a statement: “He was not a police or MI5 subject of interest.”

His mother said he had remained under monitoring by Italian intelligence ever since.

Zaghba was born in Fez in January 1995 and studied computer science at the city’s university. He left Morocco at the age of 20 to live in Italy. When his parents split up, his mother, Valeria Collina, 68, settled in the hamlet of Castello di Serravalle, about 15 miles outside Bologna, and his father stayed in Morocco.

The last time Collina heard from Zaghba was when he called last Thursday afternoon. “Now I understand that that call was his way to say goodbye,” she told L’Espresso magazine. “He didn’t say anything in particular. I just understood it from his voice.”

She said she did not hear from him again, and had asked a friend in London to look for him.

Italian officers came looking for Collina early on Tuesday morning. Initially she believed they wanted to ask her more questions about her son’s disappearance, which she had reported to the local police.



“Unfortunately we are not here for that. We came to tell you another thing,” they told her. “Your son is dead.”

She had been due to meet him in London to celebrate the end of Ramadan. She said they had joked about how he might put bunting on a car he had recently bought.

She had visited him before. “I never liked that neighbourhood,” she said. “He was hanging out with the wrong people there.”

She said she realised he might be dead when neither she nor his father could track him down and the names of the other attackers were released.

“They were his friends,” she said. Butt was a Pakistan-born British citizen and Redouane was a Moroccan, who is understood to have spent time in Libya and Ireland before moving to London.

Zaghba’s mother said he had shown her videos about Syria and “he thought Syria was a place where he could live as a ‘pure Muslim’. But he was talking as he was brainwashed by the internet. I told him there were terrible things going on there. But I was not able to change his mind.

“We have always tried to monitor his friends, making sure he didn’t hang out with the wrong people. But he had internet and everything came from there.”

The Guardian has learned that Italian intelligence was on high alert about citizens of Moroccan origin travelling to Istanbul. A few months before Zaghba tried to join Islamic State, a warning was circulated by anti-terrorism officials to police forces at the borders “to signal and point our every suspect from Morocco who is leaving from Italy to Istanbul’’.

An bulletin warned of “frequent movements of suspected terrorists from Morocco holding Italian passports, trying to reach Syria via Istanbul”.

It said: “After an exchange of intelligence data and the collaboration with other police forces, US intelligence has informed us of frequent phone calls between jihadists from Morocco based in Syria and Italian citizens. Many of the men alerted by the US live in the north of Italy with their families holding Italian passports.”

When Zaghba arrived at Marconi airport in Bologna on 15 March 2016 with only a backpack and a one-way ticket to Istanbul, he was quickly challenged. His mother was called in by investigators; he had told her he was going to Rome.

According to La Repubblica newspaper, she told them: “I don’t recognise him any more. He frightens me. He spends all day in front of the computer watching incredibly strange things.” Police searched the home and took away Zaghba’s computer.

Zaghba was interrogated but was eventually released. A review court, the tribunale del riesame, decided there was insufficient evidence of terrorism to charge him.

The Italian security services sent an alert to London with the information gathered from his phone and from other checks carried out in Bologna, understood to have included searches of his mother’s home, according to the paper.

Zaghba apparently tried again to reach Istanbul, reserving a ticket to fly from Catania in Sicily, but never took the flight.

An Italian official told the Guardian that Italian authorities had alerted their British counterparts when Zaghba moved to London. But it is unclear what form that alert took.

Franco Bortolini, a neighbour of Collina’s, described Zaghba as “normal”, the son of a “simple lady” who was “very respectful”.

“I would pass by the door and he would say hello, good morning and good evening,” he said. “For me he was a normal person. After a while not seeing him, she [Collina] said he went to work in England.”