Posted on 05/23/2013 11:50:36 AM PDT by Uncle Miltie
Michael Adebolajo, who was arrested for hacking a soldier to death in Woolwich, was brought up a devout Christian but rebelled against his parents and turned to Islam, friends and neighbours say.
Mr Adebolajo was born in Lambeth in December 1984, and brought up with his siblings in Romford by staunchly church-going parents who both worked for the NHS. He attended Marshall Park School in Romford, and Havering Sixth Form College.
Yesterday the 28-year-old was captured on film with his hands red with blood and a soldier slumped dead on the road behind him, telling passers-by: “The only reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers.
“And this British soldier is one. It is an eye for eye and a tooth for a tooth. By Allah, we swear by the almighty Allah, we will never stop fighting until you leave us alone.”
Kemi Ibrahim-Adeoti, 45, who lives near the Adebolajo family’s former home in Romford, said that Michael had been friendly with her son when they were both 17, and seemed a “typical teenager”.
There had been no sniff of radical Islam at that stage, she insisted. “No, (the family were) proper Christians, good Christians.
“He had two sisters and a brother. They were perfect.”
He later fell in with the wrong crowd in Hackney, east London despite his parents efforts to “straighten him out”, and there were several blazing rows.
Mrs Ibrahim-Adeoti said: “They thought that these guys in Hackney were leading him astray, I don’t know who they were.
“The last memory, the one I can’t get out of my head is when he had a go with his parents and he took a brick and just smashed it on the windscreen of his parents’ car. That was about six years ago before they moved.
“The parents just told me they were trying to straighten him up and he was just a typical teenager. Having said that to be honest with you I would not in a million years think Michael will be the [one involved in a] beheading.”
Mr Adebolajo converted to Islam in 2003, when he was 19. Today it emerged that in 2005 - the year of the London bombings - he started attended meetings of the radical organisation al-Muhajiroun, and one of its successor groups after it was banned in the wake of 7/7.
Both Anjem Choudary and Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, who founded and ran the group, remember seeing him regularly at al-Muhajiroun lectures, it was reported, until he suddenly stopped attending two years ago. He had adopted the name “Mujahid”, or fighter.
Mr Choudary said today that he remembered “Muhajid” as a quiet youth, and that he was surprised to hear that he was suspected of a terror attack.
Muslim friends who have seen Mr Adebolajo more recently also said they were stunned at the turn of events.
“He hid his actions from me, because he knew I would talk him out of it, he knew I believed we should voice Muslim concerns and pains publicly,” said Abu Nusaybah, who shared Mr Adebolajo’s frustrations at violence against Muslims overseas.
“Mujahid was a strong character, but I remember years back foreign policy would bring him to tears - then he just went quiet.”
Recently, wrote Abu Nusaybah in a tweet that has since been deleted, Mr Adebolajo had appeared to become intense about Islam, and had started memorising sections of the Koran.
Graham Wells, 30, a window cleaner who has known Mr Adebolajo since their schooldays and who lived in the flat below him in Romford until Michael moved out last year, said that he was a “lovely bloke who always had a smile on his face”.
He dressed casually in tracksuits and Nike trainers, not Islamic dress, and never talked about politics, said Mr Wells. He knew him as “Jay”.
“He was a lovely bloke and I can’t believe that he has done this,” said Mr Wells, who went to a different school from Mr Adebolajo but used to play football against him in the park.
“He like to smoke a bit of green [cannabis]. We played football, just a kick-about on the courts. He was a big lad, not the sort of guy you’d want to cross.
“He used to be a normal bloke. He always had a big smile on his face. He’d say, “alright Wellsy, alright boy, what’s happening?’ He was always kind to me.
“I just can’t believe he’s done that. He never talked about religion or politics. He didn’t drink. It shows you don’t really know what gets
I honestly don’t know. It would seem to me that if you’re hawking Islam, you’ve got to be doing it at the expense of some other religion. And although I’ve participated in that to an extent at the church I attended, the words ‘cut off his head’, ‘Great Satan’, and ‘blow those blasphemers off the map’ wasn’t being repeated over and over.
I will admit though, my religion really lost me when they didn’t offer me a whole pestle of virgins for approved behaviors.
The next war we fight in Europe will be to save them from their own Islamic extremists.
You don’t say.
Well, if this thug is at war with Great Britain, he’s been captured out of uniform. I believe the Geneva convention allows the Brits to summarily execute him.
A mosqeeter once bit my sister.
Of course, you have to understand what the term “Christian” means to the British these days.
That was unfrotugnat.
Converts usually feel they have to prove their new ‘faith’ by being extreme. Look at the loon boy from Canada who went to Chechnya to kill his former co-religionists.
Life’s losers are attraced to islime because it allows them to act like animals.
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