Security agencies on Tuesday conducted a search of a hotel in Jhelum owned by family members of Pakistani-born London attacker, Khuram Shazad Butt, sources told DawnNews.
Reports of the search of the hotel, located on GT Road in the Mujahidabad area, were confirmed by area residents who said the search was carried out in the morning.
Police, along with Counter-Terrorism Department and Special Security Branch officials searched the restaurant belonging to Butt’s uncle, sources said, adding that the operation was a precautionary measure after the attacker’s link to Pakistan was uncovered by investigators.
They suggested that Butt was not ‘radicalised’ in Pakistan, and that the family does not have links to religious parties.
Butt’s cousin in Pakistan, Bilal Dar, told The Associated Press that Khuram lived in the city until he was about 7-years-old.
Dar said the attack had shattered his family. The last time he spoke to Butt it wasn’t obvious that his beliefs had turned radical.
“Our family is hurt by what he did,” Dar said. “This has destroyed our family’s pride.”
Dar, 18, said that intelligence agents were interviewing relatives.
British police on Monday named two of the three attackers who killed seven people near London Bridge late on Saturday and injured dozens more, and said one of them was previously known to the security services.
London’s Metropolitan Police identified one attacker was Khuram Shazad Butt, aged 27.
Butt was previously known to police and domestic spy agency, MI5 and was a British citizen who had been born in Pakistan, the police said.
He appeared in a Channel 4 documentary entitled “The Jihadis Next Door” about British extremists that was broadcast last year, British media reported.
