Four women in Khalid's life - Mom estranged from UK attacker, wife fled after violence

Jane Harvey, Rohey Hydara

Amit Roy, TT, London, March 25: Police trying to understand why Khalid Masood killed four people and injured 50 in Westminster on Wednesday have interviewed the four women who have known him best - and still not come up with a convincing answer.

They include:

His Christian mother, Janet Elms, now 69, who had him with a black man, apparently of Nigerian descent, when she was an unmarried girl of 17.

Jane Harvey, a successful businesswoman with whom he lived for nine years from 1991 and had two daughters.

Farzana Malik, now 38, a marketing assistant whom he married at a register office in Medway, Kent, in September 2004, but it seems they were divorced within months.

Rohey Hydara, 39, his partner since 2010 who has been seen with three children, including a baby, which is thought to be his. She has been released on police bail.

Of the 11 people arrested, nine have been released. Only two remain in custody - a 27-year-old and a 58-year-old arrested in Birmingham.

It has been assumed that Masood was converted to radical Islam but it is also possible that a contributory factor was the racism he felt he had suffered as he grew up in largely white areas of Kent.

Those who knew him at school, first as Adrian Elms, his name at birth in 1964, and subsequently as Adrian Ajao (after his mother had married a Phillip Ajao in 1966), recall a popular and well adjusted boy and say his actions in Westminster were completely out of character.

It appears his mother knows very little about her 52-year-old son from whom she has been estranged for 20 years. She and her husband live in a 200-year-old detached house in a remote area of Carmarthenshire in Wales where they rear chickens and pedigree sheep and from where she sells hand-crafted cushions, handbags and blankets through her textile business, Folksy.

The house has been raided by police but the couple are not suspects.

The couple have two sons, Paul, 50, and Alexander, 40, who are half-brothers to Masood. According to the Daily Mail, Paul reportedly runs a florist's business in Banbury, Oxfordshire, and Alex is an account director at the Berlin office of an international marketing agency. Neither knows much about Masood.

His most significant relationship has been with Jane Harvey whom he met while working together at Aaron Chemicals in Bodiam, East Sussex. Calling himself "Ade", he quickly won over his younger colleague during drinks at the lively Roebuck pub in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.

The pair quickly became an item, with Jane, four years "Ade's" junior, moving in with him. As their careers blossomed, the couple moved to the sleepy village of Northiam, near Rye in East Sussex, and started a family.

In 1992, they celebrated the arrival of their first daughter, Andi Jay, before Teegan­Adrienne followed six years later.

But the relationship ended after Masood was sent to prison for two years for a knife attack on cafe owner Piers Mott. It seems he went in as "Ade" - short for Adrian Elms or Adran Ajao - and came out as Khalid Masood.

Mark Ashdown, 52, a friend from his schooldays, told The Sun: "When he first came out he told me he'd become a Muslim in prison and I thought he was joking. Then I saw he was quieter and much more serious. I gave him some cash-in-hand work for a few months as a labourer.... There were still flashes of the old Ade, but they were few and far between. I heard he'd split from his partner and got even more deeply into religion. But nothing could have prepared me for hearing his name on the radio."

His conversion would later cause a bitter row with Jane, who is said to be "not at all" religious, over the direction of their daughters' lives.

Tragedy had struck when their elder daughter Andi was hit by a car as she ran to catch a school bus and was almost killed, a neighbour said. Her injuries were so serious that she was left in a wheelchair.

Friends have recalled seeing Andi, now 24, following her conversion to Islam aged 18.

One said: "She was covered head to toe and said she never went out of the house unless she was covered up. Jane was very upset when she converted but she was over 18 and there was not much she could do about it."

And yesterday a friend told how Jane and Masood had waged war over his unsuccessful bid to convert Teegan to Islam two years ago.

Farzana is now Farzana Isaq, having married again. Her marriage to Masood had ended very quickly.

One of her relatives said: "He was very violent towards her, controlling in every aspect of her life - what she wore, where she went, everything. He was a psychopath. He came from a nice family, had everything, but there was something very wrong with him."

It is claimed that after one violent confrontation Farzana fled their home with a suitcase and ran to pals in Middlesbrough. "She was terrified, he was dangerous. She got out with a suitcase, just her clothes."

She was granted a divorce after three months of marriage, the Daily Mirror reported.

Masood's third partner, Rohey Hydara, is believed to have moved in with him seven years ago.

Electoral roll records show them living together in Luton from 2010 before the couple moved to Birmingham. And he had recently been seen with her at another address in the former 2012 Olympic village in Stratford, East London, where her wheelchair-bound mother lives.

Neighbours reported seeing the couple with a young baby, while others said they saw a boy and girl aged between eight and 10 at the address.