Extremist Muslims are running Sharia style courts, handing out gruesome punishments and grooming young Muslims in the United Kingdom’s prison system, according to claims.
A former prisoner at Her Majesty’s Prison at Woodhill, in Milton Keynes, has recounted how radical Muslims tried to get him to pledge allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS) and to denounce Queen Elizabeth II as a “false monarch” and an “enemy of Islam”.
The ex-convict, referred to by the pseudonym “Jack”, said that he witnessed a makeshift Sharia style court in the prison in which two prisoners were found guilty of the “crime” of drinking alcohol, he told British newspaper of record The Times.
Jack and Brusthom Ziamani, a man convicted for plotting to behead a British soldier, inspired by the terror-killing of Fusilier Lee Rigby, proceded to beat the ‘guilty’ prisoners until “the smaller one couldn’t open his eye, it was swollen completely shut, so we made him tell the screws he had fallen down the stairs.”
He said that Ziamani, who described himself as the “chief of the Sharia police” inside the prison, was converted to radical Islam by the hate-preacher Anjem Choudary and that the group had access to recordings from deceased al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki stored on a USB stick.
“Ziamani would pass letters about bomb-making plans and all of these strange fantasies he had about himself fighting on the front line in Syria”, said Jack.
Jack said that another inmate imprisoned for murder had shown him a copy of the book ‘Milestones’ by Egyptian Islamic scholar Sayyid Qutb, which the inmate told Jack was banned inside the prison because it was “the inspiration for the 9/11 attacks.”
The issue of Islamic radicalisation in the UK’s prison system has come under increasing security after Usman Khan, a convicted terrorist who was released from prison, shortly afterwards killed two people and injured three others in a terrorist attack on the London Bridge last month.
Professor Ian Acheson, who headed up a review of jail extremism said that the reforms he suggested in his 2016 report have not properly been implemented.
“I’m disappointed that many of the recommendations I made in 2016 to robustly respond to this threat do not seem to have been adopted. This implies a continuing serious failure of leadership and will to confront terrorism that I identified”, Acheson told The Times.
“I urge the government to return to these recommendations as a starting point to check on the reality of counter-extremism capability. If the Prison Service is not equal to the task of managing this lethal and destructive risk it should be divested of that responsibility”, he concluded.
Richard Walton, the former head of Scotland Yard’s Counter Terrorism Command, pointed to Michael Gove being replaced as a pivotal moment in the reform process.
“[Mr Gove] was intent on fully implementing the Acheson review and addressing the problem of radicalisation in jails across the country. His successor [Liz Truss] did not treat this issue with the same urgency and appeared less keen on fully implementing the Acheson recommendations.
“The Ministry of Justice should now revisit the problem of prison radicalisation in light of the recent attack. A full, transparent review of prison radicalisation and the measures in place to address it is now needed”, he added.
The percentage of Muslims in the prison system has doubled since 2008, with 13,000 self-described Muslims incarcerated in England and Wales, comprising 16 per cent of the prison population.
The former inmate who spoke to The Times said that after leaving prison he received messages, offering him help to get to Syria, however, he said that he has chosen “to leave that life” and become a peaceful Muslim.
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