Prime Minister Boris Johnson has called for an end to early prisoner release after members of the public had to tackle a rampaging jihadist armed with nothing but a fire extinguisher and a narwhal tusk.
Members of the public in Great Britain cannot carry firearms or keep them at home for self-defence, as they can in the United States and, with limits, some other states such as Israel, and even non-lethal defence articles such as pepper spray are completely prohibited.
They were therefore near-defenceless when Usman Khan, a convicted jihadist automatically released from prison on licence halfway through his term — without ever going before the Parole Board — after the Court of Appeal changed his original “public protection” sentence, showed up to a prisoner rehabilitation event armed with a huge knife.
Khan, an acolyte of Al-Muhajiroun leader Anjem Choudary, who has also been released from prison, stabbed two people to death and hospitalised three others before three have-a-go heroes armed with a fire extinguisher, a narwhal tusk grabbed from the Fishmonger’s Hall where the prisoner rehabilitation event was taking place, and their bare hands managed to subdue him.
Armed police then intervened and shot Khan dead, presumably because he was wearing a suicide belt — which subsequently turned out to be a fake.
After attending the scene of Khan’s deadly attack, which was also targeted by radical Islamic terrorists in 2017, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the practice of releasing serious criminals on licence halfway through determinate sentences — an arguably misleading practice which often leads the public to believe criminals are serving twice as much time in custody as they are in reality — “simply isn’t working”,
“It does not make sense for us as a society to be putting people who have been convicted of terrorist offences… out on early release,” the Tory leader argued.
London mayor Sadiq Khan, whose Labour party introduced automatic release on licence at the halfway point in sentences, tried to shift the blame elsewhere, claiming that “You can’t disaggregate terrorism and security from cuts made to resources” in an apparent job at Tory austerity — although as mayor he is also partly responsible for police funding, and has chosen to invest large sums of public money in questionable projects such as an online hate crime hub.
Mayor Khan’s position that it is legitimate to link terror attacks to austerity is also curious insofar as he is frequently at pains to stress that it is not legitimate to link terror attacks to mass migration or religion.
He also stressed in his immediate response to this latest atrocity that London is “the greatest city in the world” and “one of our greatest strengths is our diversity”.
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