London attacker's mother blames Internet for son's radicalisation

Zaghba, 22, has been identified as the third of the three attackers shot dead by police after their attack in London that killed seven people and left dozens injured.

A Moroccan-Italian dual national, he had tried to join the Islamic State group in Syria last year and was notified to Britain as a suspect figure after being intercepted by Italian authorities. His mother, Valeria Collina, a convert to Islam who is separated from the attacker's father, told Italian weekly L'Espresso that she thought her son had been radicalised by a combination of online propaganda and contacts in London.

"We always kept an eye on who he was friends with and checked that he was not mixed up with the wrong people," she told the magazine in her only interview since her son was identified. Citing the internet as the cause she said, "He never let himself be led by anyone, neither in Italy, nor in Morocco, where he was studying computing at the University of Fez."

Collina said she had been concerned by the milieu in the part of east London where her son lived. The Italian said that her son had shown her videos about Syria before his March 2016 attempt to board a flight for Turkey, apparently with the intention of reaching its conflict-torn neighbour.

"But he never spoke about going to fight there. For him Syria was a place where you could live according to a pure Islam. The way he told it was a fantasy...transmitted to him over the internet."

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