London Bridge terrorist is buried in PoK village

Srinagar: Usman Khan, suspected of killing two people in a terror attack near London Bridge on November 29 was buried in ancestral village in Kotli district of Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir (PoK) on Friday night.

Reports received here from across the Line of Control (LoC) said that the corpse of 28-year-old Kashmir was earlier flown to Pakistan from Britain by his parents and sister after his namaz-e-janaza (Islamic funeral prayer) was offered in a mosque in Birmingham.

The reports said that Khan was buried in a family cemetery at Aanglni in Kotli after funeral prayers were offered a second time in the village close to the LoC.

It is the same area where Khan had, as per the British authorities, set up a terrorist military training facility under the guise of a ‘madrassa’ on the land owned by his family and had reportedly admitted to fundraising and recruiting for the facility.

The locals said that they attended Khan’s last rites out of sympathy with the family and not because they condoned the attack.

The London’s metropolitan police had said that Khan, who went on the rampage, targeting people at Fishmongers’ Hall near London Bridge in the heart of the city’s financial district, had been convicted of terrorism offences in 2012 but was released from jail in December 2018 on an ankle monitor.

A man and a woman were killed and two women were injured in the November 29 London Bridge attack.

The British authorities had alleged that Khan, a resident of Stoke in central England, had before his killing by police planned to start a “terrorist military training facility.” He was among nine persons, who were earlier arrested in 2010 as part of a major counter-terrorism operation  and accused of terror charges over an alleged Al Qaeda inspired plot to bomb the London Stock Exchange.