In the end, Michael Adebolajo still showed absolutely no remorse at the killing of Lee Rigby.
As the verdict of murder was delivered, Michael Adebolajo smirked and kissed his copy of the Koran – the teachings of which he had twisted to justify his savagery. He then looked to the heavens as if obeying Allah’s command before being led away to the cells. It was a final act of defiance from the 29-year-old convert who used the trial to peddle his hatred of Britain and his love of Al Qaeda.
Again and again he told Lee Rigby’s family how he will never regret killing the fusilier because he is a ‘soldier of Allah’. It is an image completely at odds with his Christian upbringing in a loving lower middle class family in a London suburb where he once dreamed of becoming a policeman.
Last night a family friend told Mail: ‘He had been brainwashed to the point of madness. How can someone raised with middle-class values go from wanting to be a policeman to this? His mother raised him as a Christian with good manners and respect. She still doesn’t understand how he turned into a monster.’ Adebolajo, 29, was born in Lambeth, South London, in 1984 to parents Anthony, a mental health nurse, and Tina, a teacher, who both emigrated from the south-west of Nigeria.
By all accounts he enjoyed a happy upbringing in Romford with his brother Jeremiah and sisters Blessing and Christiana. His parents regularly took the children to church and Bible study. Pictures show a neatly dressed, good-looking boy whom friends described as ‘easy going and a bit of a joker’. Among his close circle of friends at secondary school was Kirk Redpath, a lance corporal in the Army who was killed by a roadside bomb near Basra in Iraq in 2007.
Both spent time at each other’s houses after lessons. When asked about Mr Redpath in court, Adebolajo said: ‘I hold Tony Blair responsible for his death.’ Today Mr Redpath’s younger brother Grant, 26, finds it hard to believe that the ‘laid-back’ teenager who used to crack jokes at his house has become a terrorist.
‘What happened in Woolwich was butchery,’ he said. ‘I’ve asked myself whether he would have done this to my brother also. 'I don’t know what happened to Michael because he used to be the most laid-back, nicest guy in the world. I can’t feel anger toward the Michael I knew, because he was so nice a person. We can’t understand it. I don’t think we ever will.’ Others who knew Adebolajo as a teenager remember him as a keen footballer and rapper.
Beautician Justine Ridgen, 26, who was once shortlisted as the ‘Face of Essex’ dated him for a year before his descent into extremism. ‘He was just a lovely polite boy. He was a very family-oriented person,’ she said.
As Adebolajo reached his mid-teens, however, the first signs emerged of a young man beginning to rebel against the Christian orthodoxy. He left school at 16, moving to Havering Sixth Form College for his A-levels. It was around this time that he fell in with a Nigerian gang. Some claim he started holding knives to people’s throats to steal their mobile phones. Others suggested he became addicted cannabis and started selling drugs. He has three criminal convictions from his teenage years, including one for robbery. Then came his conversion to Islam.
‘When he was about 17 he just locked himself in this room with this bloke for a few hours and when he came out he was a Muslim convert,’ a classmate said. ‘He was spouting all sorts of stuff and said he had changed his name.’ His interest in radical Islam sparked furious rows with his parents.Concerned, they moved the family to Saxilby, a rural village near Lincoln.
However, in 2003, aged 19, he returned to London and enrolled in a building and surveying course at Greenwich University in south London. During his second year at university he began to mix with the more radical Muslims. Hate preacher Omar Bakri Mohammed, the so-called ‘Tottenham Ayatollah’ who founded the now-banned extremist group Al-Muhajiroun, has even tried to claim credit for converting Adebolajo to Islam.
He told the BBC’s Panorama: ‘The people were so happy about what Michael did. They carry attack against the British soldiers in the British soil. And we were so proud. He used to be one of my students.’
Adebolajo dropped out and changed his named to Mujahid Abu Hamza and started wearing traditional Muslim robes.
In 2005 he met hate preacher Anjem Choudary. In November 2006 he was arrested in a scuffle between extremists and police outside the Old Bailey during the trial of a fanatic accused of calling for British soldiers to be killed. As he was led away he shouted about the right to ‘behead those who insult Islam’. The next year he was seen protesting outside Paddington Green police station.
Then in 2008 he was jailed for 51 days by magistrates for punching two officers during a demonstration outside the Danish embassy. On an anniversary of 9/11 in 2009, he encouraged 1,500 followers to turn against Britain in a hate-filled rant outside a mosque. Standing on a platform, he yelled: ‘Do not be scared of the filthy kuffar [non-believers]. They are pigs.’
Adebolajo, who worked as a fitness instructor, had considerable influence in persuading those close to him to convert to Islam, including his brother Jeremiah, 27, and his sister Christiana, 22. He has fathered six children by at least two women – Rikki Thomas and Makaela Murray-Jacobs – both of whom are Muslim converts.
Miss Murray-Jacobs, 27, registered the birth of boy Abdullah Shoaib Tariq Aziz at Lambeth Register Office in Brixton on 22 May 2013, just hours before his father killed Lee Rigby. They also have a girl, Junaydah Safiyah Adebolajo, born at Lewisham Hospital, in south London, in February 2007. Makaela, a Muslim covert, told the Mail she was not involved in the murder of Lee Rigby. She said: ‘This has got nothing to do with me.’
The PE teacher, from south London, has set up home in Qatar’s capital Doha with Abdebolajo’s children where she intends to live an ‘Islamic life’.
Brought up a Christian, she converted while studying at Greenwich University – where she met Adebolajo.
Credits: DailyMail
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