ROME—One of three jihadis who killed seven people in London last week told Italian police he wanted to be a terrorist when they kept him from traveling to the Middle East last year, an Italian prosecutor said on Tuesday.
British police named Moroccan-Italian Youssef Zaghba, 22, as one of the perpetrators of the June 3 attack, the third carried out by radical Islamic terrorists in Britain in as many months.
Zaghba, whose Italian mother lives near the city of Bologna, was stopped at the airport there in 2016 when he was trying to fly to Turkey, city prosecutor Giuseppe Amato told broadcaster Radio24.
“A person going to Turkey with a backpack aroused some suspicion, also because he told the agent who checked him that he wanted to go and be a terrorist, then he corrected himself,” Bologna prosecutor Giuseppe Amato told broadcaster Radio24.
Turkey has been routinely used by radical Islamic terrorists as a route into areas of Syria controlled by the ISIS terrorist group.
