From smiling Kent schoolboy to murdering jihadi: Police release mugshot of Westminster terrorist as schoolfriend reveals popular footballer suffered ‘mild racism’ for being the only black student
This is the first picture of the Westminster ISIS-inspired jihadi Khalid Masood as an adult in a police mugshot released by Scotland Yard today.
Masood, 52, was a career criminal with a string of convictions for violent crimes and weapons offences who was jailed twice and radicalised behind bars.
The Met released his picture as part of a public appeal for information as officers try to find out if the extremist was acting alone or helped by a wider terror network in Britain.
Today photographs of Masood as a schoolboy in affluent Tunbridge Wells also emerged where he was described as a ‘bright’ student and an outstanding footballer who had no interest in religion and ‘liked to party’.
And it was revealed he blamed racism in his village when he slashed a cafe owner across the face with a knife in 2000 after a night drinking in his local pub.
Born Adrian Russell Elms on Christmas Day, 1964, his birth certificate gives his single mother’s name as Janet Elms, a 17-year-old office worker from Croydon in South London.
His father’s name is not recorded, although Miss Elms married Phillip Ajao two years later and he is listed as Masood’s father in later records.
School friends at the Huntley School for Boys in Tunbridge Wells knew him as Adrian Ajao – or ‘black Ade’ – and said he was popular and fun-loving.
His classmates said today they were shocked he became an ISIS-inspired terrorist who would kill four people and injure 50 on his murderous rampage outside Parliament on Wednesday.
Friend Kenton Till, who was in a football team photo from 1980 with Masood, told MailOnline his school friend suffered racism for being the only black boy but they fell out after he smoked drugs and was thrown out of a house party.
He said: ‘We were good friends for about three of four years he was very bright, very academic and he was good sports – good at everything really. He was very good at football.
He said: ‘We were good friends for about three of four years he was very bright, very academic and he was good sports – good at everything really. He was very good at football.
‘He wasn’t religious at all. He was a big character, very friendly and a good laugh. He might have been the only black kid at the school. He experienced a little bit of racism but not a lot because he always tried to be popular.
‘We used to socialise together up until we left school but he turned up to a party at my house with some friends after they had been smoking puff [cannabis] and my mum threw them all out. We sort of lost touch after that’.
Revealed: He was known at Adrian Ajao while at school in Tunbridge Wells – after several spells in prison he became radicalised (right after being gunned down outside Parliament on Wednesday)
First picture: This is Westminster ISIS-inspired jihadi Khalid Masood (circled in 1980) when he was a student at Huntleys Secondary School in Kent, which would later close and is now a housing estate
Schoolboys: This photograph of Ajao was of the Huntleys Secondary School for Boys football team in around 1979 or 1980 when he was 15 or 16 years old during a 24-hour charity event
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