The foster parents of the Parsons Green bomber are to sue the local authority for placing the Iraqi teen in their care without telling them he had been “recruited” and “trained to kill by ISIS.”
Pensioners Penny and Ron Jones are to sue Surrey County Council for negligence claiming it had withheld vital information about the dangers posed by Ahmed Hassan, the ‘child refugee’ who went on to injure 51 people when he left an explosive device on a train which detonated at Parsons Green London underground station on September 15th, 2017.
Hassan, who claimed to be 15 years old when he travelled illegally to Britain from a Paris migrant camp in 2015, had been placed in the care of the elderly couple, though the local council failed to tell them that he had informed the Home Office’s immigration centre about his links to the terror group — instead, authorities sold him to the couple as merely a “troubled young person.”
A lawyer representing Mr and Mrs Jones told The Telegraph, “Surrey County Council owed Penny and Ron a duty to disclose key information about the danger Ahmed posed, and to ensure any information given was accurate, before asking them to invite him into their home.
“Instead he was presented merely as a troubled young person. This is a clear failing by the council and gives rise to claims in negligence and under the Human Rights Act 1998.”
Solicitor Jocelyn Cockburn, from Hodge Jones & Allen, added, “Had the appropriate disclosure been made, Penny and Ron would not have agreed to foster Ahmed and accordingly not have suffered the distress and other difficulties they have endured.”
Mrs Jones, who with her husband had fostered hundreds of children and received MBEs in 2010 for their services to children, told media how Hassan had manipulated his way into her family home, after social services told her “that he had tried to kill himself and would only be released if he was fostered into a stable home so we took him in.”
“When Ahmed’s trial was going on, I was asked if I knew if he had said he was trained to kill by Isis and I said no, we would never have taken him if we’d known,” Mrs Jones added.
A spokesman for the Council said they were defending the claim.
Hassan, now claiming to be 19, had made the bomb whilst the pensioners were on holiday in the seaside resort of Blackpool.
After being apprehended by authorities, the Iraqi migrant was not charged with terror offences, however, but with criminal charges of attempted murder. He was later found guilty and sentenced to life with a minimum 34 years’ imprisonment in 2018.
The Old Bailey had heard that the young illegal migrant had been referred to the government’s anti-extremism strategy Prevent after he had told his teacher it was his “duty to hate Britain” because of the country’s involvement in the War on Terror and after she had caught a WhatsApp message on his phone reading, “IS [Islamic State] has accepted your donation.”