The widow of the ringleader of the London Bridge attacks has said she still cannot comprehend what he did and did not realise the extent of his radicalisation because they led “different lives”.
Zahrah Rehman, who married Khuram Butt on Christmas Day 2013, said she suspected her husband might try to fight in Syria but never dreamed he would attack his own country. Butt and his two accomplices killed eight people on 3 June 2017 before being shot dead by armed officers.
Weeping as she gave evidence at the inquests into the victims of the attack, Rehman told the Old Bailey in London on Thursday: “I was living with him and he was in the same house as me and my kids, how can he do that? I couldn’t register it, even now I can’t register it. Even now, it’s been two years and I haven’t been able to look at the victims’ pictures.”
She added: “I knew there’s a probability he’d want to go to Syria but he never ever said anything in front of me that he wanted to attack this country.”
The court was shown videos of Butt and Rehman on holiday in Pakistan in 2014. One, in which the pair rode side-by-side on camels, shows Butt smiling into the camera and saying: Dawlat Islamia (Islamic State).
Rehman told the court she was not aware of the meaning of the phrase at the time. She described as “obviously not funny” a video of the pair on the plane, joking about naming international airports after extremists such as Anwar al-Awlaki and Omar Bakri. Asked about her own suggestion in the video that they name London City airport after a pseudonym for Anjem Choudary, she said: “It just came into my head to carry on the joke he [Butt] was doing.”
Rehman, said she confronted Butt on a number of occasions about his behaviour, including after he appeared in a documentary called The Jihadi Next Door, after he was barred from Barking mosque in east London and got into a physical altercation with a member of the anti-extremism organisation Quilliam. But she said her husband always made excuses, presenting himself as an innocent party.
The court heard that in 2016, Rehman’s father took away all of the family’s passports after Butt planned a holiday to Turkey.
She told the court: “We can go anywhere on holiday, why do we have to go there? I did have my doubts that he was so interested in what was going on in Syria, that he was using Turkey as an excuse [to get to Syria].”
Rehman was asked why, as an “intelligent and educated woman”, she never reported him to the police or left him for good, given that she walked out for a month when he said he would take a second wife before later returning to the family home.
She said: “We were living together but it was almost as though we were living different lives … The way he would talk to me, the way he would treat our [non-Muslim] neighbours … he never showed me signs that he would attack these same people.”
Rehman told the court that she would be confined to a different room when her husband’s friends visited the flat because of beliefs on gender separation and when he went out he would just say: “I am going to see the brothers.”
She highlighted the time when she raised concerns about the trip to Turkey as a pivotal point in their relationship.
“After that day, he realised he couldn’t trust me again,” she said, “He just hid all of that stuff from me … he knew I was a follower of British Islam.”
Rehman told the court that her husband would often demean her “British Islam” when she tried to confront him about his views.
She told the court that on the day of the attacks they went to the park and then Asda. The last time she saw him was when he pecked her on the cheek as she dozed with their children, she said, recounting that he never kissed his son and daughter goodbye.
She went to her uncle’s house and when she got back to their flat in Barking all the lights were on, Butt’s clothes were strewn on the bed and the back door was slamming open and shut in the wind. Rehman angrily tried to contact her husband but said, with hindsight, “obviously, he was already dead”.
Rehman said she did not mourn for Butt, nor attend his funeral, but mourned his victims and revealed that she had, anonymously, laid flowers for them at London Bridge.
Later the inquests heard evidence from Butt’s brother-in-law, who called the anti-terrorism hotline in 2015 after almost coming to blows with him. Usman Darr made the call after Butt defended the burning alive of a Jordanian pilot by Isis.
Another argument arose, Darr said, when both Butt and Rehman defended Choudary. Darr, who has since separated from Butt’s sister Haleema, said: “Khuram was very eager to defend him [Choudary], blaming the media and whatnot and his wife really agreed with him.”
Darr said he avoided contact with Butt subsequently and also told his wife not to take their children to his brother-in-law’s flat. Their only encounters were at the home of Darr’s mother-in-law.
Asked by Gareth Patterson QC, representing the families of six of victims of the attacks, how he felt that his warning to the hotline was not passed to police investigating Butt at that time, Darr replied: “Eight people lost their lives sir.”
Dominic Adamson, representing Christine Delcros, who was hit by the
van used by the attackers and whose fiance, Xavier Thomas, a 45-year-old French national, was killed, thanked Darr on behalf of his client. “You alone called the anti-terror hotline and did your bit,” Adamson said.
Aside from Thomas, those who died were Chrissy Archibald, 30, from Canada, Sébastien Bélanger, 36, a French chef, Kirsty Boden, 28, a nurse from Australia, Spaniard Ignacio Echeverría, 39, James McMullan, 32, the only Briton, who was from Brent, north-west London, Alexandre Pigeard, 26, a French restaurant worker and Sara Zelenak, 21, an Australian national.
The inquests continue.
