Officers tasked with monitoring Usman Khan, the convicted terrorist who was released from prison early and stabbed two people to death in London, had “no specific training”.
Khan had been convicted in 2012 of involvement in an extensive radical Islamic terrorist plot to bomb the London Stock Exchange and the Palace of Westminster, which also targeted the private homes of then-London mayor Boris Johnson, the Dean of Chapter House at St Paul’s Cathedral, and two rabbis.
He only had to serve a 16-year term after appeal court judges quashed his original indeterminate sentence, however, and like most criminals in Britain was out well before that term was up due to legislation granting prisoners the right to automatic early release on licence.
Khan was “assessed as the highest level of risk” when he was freed, with “22 licence conditions attach[ed] to his release” according to lawyers — but this did not stop him from being able to carry out a deadly knife attack at Fishmonger’s Hall in London, ironically at a rehabilitation event.
An inquest heard that the Prevent officers who were supposed to be monitoring Khan when he struck “had no specific training in handling terrorist offenders.”
There was also “no security check on the door” at the Fishmonger’s Hall event where his attack began, a lawyer representing victims’ families revealed — “not even a rudimentary bag check.”
Khan, wielding two knives and wearing a bogus suicide vest, was ultimately contained by members of the public armed with improvised weapons including a fire extinguisher and a narwhal tusk once his attack moved outside to London Bridge, before being shot dead by specialist firearms officers.
Lawyers representing Khan’s mother, Parveen Begum, said she was “deeply shocked” by her son’s attack, and that she “still finds it hard to believe such terrible damage was caused by her son.”
The family “condemn Usman Khan’s actions”, the lawyers said, adding that they “want to better understand how this tragedy happened. How a family member who they thought was reformed, committed this atrocity.”
Shortly after the attack, Boris Johnson himself admitted that very few Islamist prisoners are successfully rehabilitated.
“I think, looking at the problems we have with re-educating and reclaiming and rehabilitating people who succumb to Islamism, it’s very, very hard, and very tough, and it can happen, but the instances of success are really very few,” he confessed.
This revelation proved to be of little help to the British public in the months following the November 2019 attack, however, with two more people being stabbed by another freed terrorist in Streatham in February 2020.
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