Graffiti supporting the UK-born Pakistani-origin man behind the London Bridge terrorist attack last month has been discovered in his home city of Stoke-on-Trent in central England, according to a media report.
'The Sunday Times' said it discovered the graffiti reading "Usman Khan Call 4 Justice" last week as part of an investigation into the killer's background and movements.
Khan was shot dead by police officers after he went on a knife rampage on November 29, killing two people. The 28-year-old is thought to be one of six children — five brothers and a sister — raised by their taxi driver father Taj and his wife Parveen.
Khan, whose body was reportedly secretly flown back to his family's ancestral village of Kajlani in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) this weekend, grew up in Cobridge area of Stoke-on-Trent where one of his siblings still lives.
"I condemn their actions," Mohammed Pervez, leader of Stoke's Labour Party group in the area, told the newspaper. "The graffiti will be offensive to the family of Usman Khan and to the wider community," he said.
Last week, Khan's relatives issued a statement denouncing his attack and expressing condolences to the victims' families. Tagged with the letters "COB", the graffiti is believed to refer to a local gang calling themselves the Cobridge Boys.
The rundown area is home to a large Pakistani community that moved to Stoke in the late 1950s and 1960s to work in the Potteries' ceramics factories.
Khan was arrested with two others from Stoke as part of a nine-member Al Qaeda plot to blow up the London Stock Exchange and plans to set up a terrorist training factory in the garb of a madrassa on land owned by Khan’s family in PoK.
He was jailed indefinitely for public protection in 2012, but this was replaced by a 16-year sentence on appeal. It meant he was freed in December 2018 after serving half his sentence and went on to stage the terror attack last month.
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