Ivan Houchena, who was a victim of the tragedy, told RTÉ that he had also heard about other cases.

This may be the first ever time a bus is used as a weapon to kill people. It appears to have been targeted, it has been a bus full of people, it was a bus full of Muslims which got on the wrong side of the line. That’s why it seems to have happened. It was a targeted attack – that’s why it was targeted. And clearly, if it had been a Muslim, it would have been another incident. There are only about 400,000 Muslims in this country, they are more or less the same as non-Muslims. So, this is like what we’ve had in the past. You don’t go on the Tube today if you are a white man. You never even want to go to the cinema, you don’t go in nightclubs, you don’t go to sporting events anymore. So, this sort of thing is more or less the way it has been for a long time, and it has to stop. We don’t want this to happen.

A report by the UK think-tank Policy Exchange earlier this year suggested that more and more young Muslims in the UK were considering becoming terrorists.

Some 600 Muslims were arrested under counter-terrorism laws in 2015, an increase of nearly 500 per cent on 2010 – far in excess of the 50 reported in 2005 and 2007 of which three had been sentenced.

In January 2015, the Home Office published its list of “Prevented Extremists” – an attempt to identify British potential terrorists which included more than 10,000 people.

Some 1,600 people have been caught since 2005 for plotting or considering carrying out terrorist attacks, according to the Home Office.

An open letter to President Obama from six leading Muslim leaders in London read: