LONDON — The Islamic State-inspired terrorist who murdered four people in Westminster lied to his family that he was flying to Saudi Arabia before disappearing to prepare for the attack.

Adrian Ajao, who used his Muslim name Khalid Masood, kept his movements secret from his family and associates, bolstering the theory he was a “lone wolf” jihadist rather than linked to any terror cell.

All but one of the people arrested following Wednesday’s attack have now been released by Scotland Yard, including a 39-year-old woman understood to be Rohey Hydara.

Flamboyantly dressed in colourful African clothing, Ms Hydara, a mother of two, is linked to Masood at three addresses in London and in Luton since about 2010 and was said to have been his partner. She faces no further action and has been completely cleared of any involvement in his actions.

A 58-year-old man, thought to be a Saudi national, who was arrested in Birmingham in an armed raid on Thursday, remains in custody.

Police are urgently trying to discover where Masood, 52, stayed in Birmingham and who he met there in the days before he hired a Hyundai 4x4, using it as a weapon to mow down pedestrians on Westminster Bridge.

Ms Hydara, who is from Gambia in West Africa but now lives in a rented flat in east London, has told friends that she thought Masood was going away to Saudi, according to a source. Masood had worked in Saudi Arabia in two stints between 2005 and 2006 and 2008 and 2009 before travelling to Mecca for a religious pilgrimage in March 2015.

The source said: “Khalid (Masood) lied to Rohey (Hydara). He said he was going to Saudi Arabia. She wasn’t aware of the attack. If she had known she would have stopped him.”

Terror police and secret services are also investigating what messages he sent from his WhatsApp account in the minutes before the attack. Masood was active on the messaging app at 2.37pm on Wednesday. He began his murderous onslaught about 2.40pm.

MI5 are also re-examining a dossier compiled on Masood “several years ago” when he came to the attention of intelligence agents over his “peripheral” link to other suspected terrorists.

One area being looked at is any possible connections Masood may have had to Islamist extremists who lived in Luton when he was there. Masood is registered at two separate addresses in Luton between 2009 and 2011, living there with Ms Hydara. At the time, Anjem Choudary, a notorious hate preacher, was highly active in the Bedfordshire town; while in December 2010 Taimur Abdulwahab al-Abdaly travelled from Luton to Stockholm in Sweden to carry out a suicide bombing in which he succeeded in killing only himself, although two innocent bystanders were injured.

Security services will explore any possible connections to four members of a terror cell who were jailed in 2013 over an attempt to blow up a Territorial Army base in Luton by sending a remote-controlled car carrying a homemade bomb under the gates. The four men jailed all lived within about a mile of Masood in the town.

The picture that has emerged of Masood in the days since the Westminster attack show the killer to be a highly strung man, prone to sudden bursts of violence. He was obsessed with knives and for 20 years, often under the influence of drink and drugs, committed crimes that led to spells in jail.

He converted to Islam in about 2003 during a stint in prison, and at some stage after that came to the attention of MI5 over links to “violent extremism”. But he stayed out of trouble and secret services dismissed him as no longer a risk to the public.

On Wednesday he died from bullet wounds to the chest having tried to storm Parliament wielding a 20cm knife.

It was all a far cry from his well-to-do upbringing in the English Home Counties. Masood was born on Christmas Day in 1964 to a white mother and a black father. His birth certificate lists only his mother Janet Alison Elms, then 17, who described herself as a “comptometer operator”, a mechanical calculator used in accounting. The space for the father’s name has been left blank and Masood is listed at birth as Adrian Russell Elms.

But by the time he went to school in Tunbridge Wells in Kent he was going by the name Adrian Ajao, his father Phillip’s name. Mr and Mrs Ajao now live on a farm in Wales.

Masood was the eldest of three brothers. Despite being bright enough, he failed his 11-plus and went to Huntleys Secondary School for Boys where photographs from the time show a broadly smiling 15-year-old in the football team line-up.

Friends from the time remember him as a “bloody good footballer” and a “popular kid” with a “big personality”. He had his own band, which he named after himself, called Alternative Ad (short for Adrian), and played the drums and sang.

“He wasn’t a loner. He was cheeky and always had a smile on his face,” said one former schoolfriend. But Masood, as he hit his late teens, began drinking and taking drugs. “Towards the end he got a bit out of touch,” said the friend. “He got into drug dealing.”

At the age of 18, Masood was convicted for the first time for an offence of criminal damage. Police said his last conviction was in 2003.

In the early 1990s he met Jane Harvey, 48, a businesswoman who ran the family chemical cleaning firm, with whom he would have two daughters. Masood quickly moved into her £700,000 (S$1.2 million) home in Northiam, a village close to Rye in East Sussex.

Mr Mark Ashdown, an old friend from school, who trusted Masood enough in those days to let him cuddle his newborn son in an affectionate photograph made public over the weekend, said Masood went off the rails after he was slashed in the face in a pub fight. After that, Masood started carrying knives. He would get into fights regularly, often accusing his intended victims of racism before launching a surprise, brutal attack. He would be jailed twice for slashing people with knives.

Despite settling in Northiam, he conducted a reign of terror. Mr Lee Lawrence, 47, a friend from the village, has told the Telegraph how he harboured a “blood lust” and had told him: “I dream about blood. I dream about killing someone.”

In Northiam, Masood slashed the tyres of the cars of the women’s netball team after his partner was left out of the team because the other women did not want Masood turning up to matches.

On another occasion, in a chilling echo of events 20 years later, he tried to run a neighbour down in his car by mounting the pavement.

Mr Nigel Gill, who runs a local store, said: “This woman was just sat in the pub and Adrian walked over to her and asked if she wanted a drink. She said no and he got right up close in her face and said: ‘Why what’s wrong with me. Is it because I am black?’ and then he spat in her face and headbutted her. He was vicious. He was a bully. In the row over the netball team, he went out with his car and threatened a local woman who was walking along by almost running her over on the pavement. He mounted the kerb. He was giving her a warning.”

In 2004, Masood married Farzana Malik but, according to her friends, she fled in fear of her life.

A year after getting married, Masood moved to Saudi Arabia for the first time, teaching English as a foreign language. Back in the UK, he moved between Luton, east London and Birmingham, setting up a tutoring business for Arab students called IQRA. He had seemingly settled down and perhaps it is not surprising that MI5 had stopped taking an interest.

But at the age of 52 — some 30 years older than the typical jihadi terrorist — something inside Masood snapped. Just as he would “boil over” and launch premeditated attacks in local pubs, he would do so again on a much larger, more terrifying scale last Wednesday afternoon on Westminster Bridge. The Telegraph