Sun man who grew up with London terror attacker Khalid Masood reveals sicko craved attention and drank with National Front thugs
WESTMINSTER terrorist Khalid Masood was notorious in his home town as a teenager.
The Sun’s Associate News Editor JOHN STURGIS knew him when the killer was called Adrian Ajao as they grew up in middle-class Tunbridge Wells, Kent, in the early 1980s.
And he reveals the troubled young black man turned to drugs and violence before flirting with football hooliganism and reportedly even the far-right National Front.
ADRIAN Ajao always craved attention. And as a young man in my home town, he got it.
I first encountered him as the older, cooler, edgier brother of my classmate Paul in the early 1980s.
Tunbridge Wells in those days wasn’t the most ethnically diverse place in the world. Paul was the only black boy in our school year group of 100 boys.
And as the pictures emerging today show, Adrian was also visibly unique in his age group.
Paul, an affable boy liked by everyone, seemed to deal with the race issue by knuckling down – he kept his head down, did his homework and got on.
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Adrian was different. He grew to apparently like standing out.
He didn’t do well at school, failing his 11-plus exam while Paul was to pass his.
Despite being clearly very bright, Adrian ended up at the boys’ secondary modern Huntleys, long since shut down, where there were very limited expectations on pupils to succeed academically.
The classmates with him in these photographs when he was 15 were destined for careers in building, scaffolding, labouring.
But Adrian didn’t want to settle for that. He aspired to much more.
He started a band but it was all about him
He wanted to be a rock star. He took up the guitar and started his own band. Nothing particularly unusual in that for teenagers but where Adrian differed was that it was all about him. And he was very open about that.
Most bands on that circuit were lame post punk copies of the The Cure or Echo & the Bunnymen and had names to match.
But Adrian’s band names reflected him personally. Alternative AD. Then AD Alternative. Revelation AD.
The AD was short for Adrian and indicated, none too subtly, that he was the star, the frontman, and the others on stage were just his backing band.
While other teenage amateur new wavers were tongue-tied and shy on stage, mumbling between songs if they spoke at all, Adrian was a showman. He would introduce songs with speeches.
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He was in his element on stage. He loved the mic.
And he was larger than life off stage too. He was animated, excitable, borderline hyper. A livewire, a show-off even.
Despite being too young to legally drink, he was a regular in the town’s pubs. They were his stage when a real one wasn’t available.
He seemed to consistently have cannabis too. Where others smoked cautiously — furtively — Adrian did it quite ostentatiously. It was part of the image.
He also dabbled in selling it at times. I’m not sure with how much serious intent but it was known that Adrian could “sort you out”.
And he could look after himself. I suspect he had to as one of the only, if not the only, black boys at Huntleys — a school we thought of as being “hard”.
Adrian would undoubtedly have been the butt of horrific racist bullying and learned to fight back.
He had a long running feud with one of the other boys at Huntleys school that became quite nasty. And violent. It started over something quite minor, a row over musical taste, that blew up.
After a series of smaller skirmishes, they finally had a fierce fight one night outside a pub, the Village Inn.
It turned into a mass brawl. Someone got a glass in the face. It was scary stuff. But it meant that his reputation spread further.
As the news of Adrian’s murderous end filtered around my old Tunbridge Wells social circles, people were initially stunned that the town could have produced a jihadist killer.
Memory banks were raided. Old stories reeled out. One told how he’d been linked to another extremist cult back in the early 1980s — as the only black lad in the Kentish National Front.
The Roebuck pub was the most notorious skinhead drinking den, home to a chapter of the so-called Headhunter football hooligans who caused trouble at Chelsea and England games.
Adrian would drink there, it was suggested, and ended up being sucked into extreme right-wing politics, even going on an NF march.
A bizarre suggestion but I’m told it’s true. And if it was, then there is an intriguing footnote: the Roebuck, long since shut down, was to become the site of the town’s first mosque and would have been Adrian’s local centre of worship when he was released from prison as a new Muslim convert.
Could he have been the one and only person who drank there with the skinheads and later worshipped there? Conceivably, yes.
One old school friend told me yesterday: “As soon as I heard the words Ajao and Kent, I feared that it would be him.” No one would ever have thought it could be Paul. But Adrian — on reflection, not so surprising.
He seemed to exhibit the necessary traits — a self-centred personality, a tendency to behaviour more extreme than the other boys, a propensity to violence.
I hadn’t seen him for 30 years but I had never forgotten him
I hadn’t seen him for 30 years but I had never forgotten him. He seemed volatile then and at times there was a hint of potential menace.
But he was also capable of being charming, captivating, very funny.
He was a larger than life character in a small town — the classic big fish in a small pond who never worked out how to graduate to a bigger one. Until Wednesday.
Adrian’s reputation has finally spread much, much wider.
FARMER MOTHER
By ALEX WEST
THE mother of Westminster terrorist Khalid Masood lives the “Good Life” dream in a farmhouse keeping chickens and making handicrafts.
Janet Ajao, 69, is described by neighbours as a “sweet grey-haired old lady” who retired to the Welsh countryside with husband Phillip.
In 1999 they bought the 60-acre farm in Carmarthenshire, where they raise sheep to sell at organic markets. She also makes cushions and rugs to sell online.
Their lifestyle could not be further from the carnage created by Janet’s son, who she named Adrian Russell when she gave birth to him aged 17, two years before she married Phillip.
His actions have left her devastated, pals say.
Phillip, who is believed to have a Nigerian background, is in hospital battling cancer and she is alone at home.
Friend Mark Sillars said last night: “Janet is probably feeling very alone. Her son is dead, her husband is ill.”
Janet and Phillip turned heads when they moved in as the first mixed-race marriage in the tiny village of Trelech — population 745.
Mark said: “They were friendly and neighbourly. We would have no reason to suspect anything until this happened.”
Local police searched Janet’s house on Thursday and quizzed her about her son.
A spokeswoman said: “The occupants are receiving appropriate support. They are not suspects and have not been arrested.”