LET OUT TO KILL
Usman Khan jailed for LSE bomb plot ‘Too harsh’ sentence ditched on appeal
JUSTICE chiefs were facing urgent questions last night after it emerged London Bridge killer Usman Khan was a convicted terrorist who had been freed less than a year ago – despite being flagged as “a significant risk”.
Khan had been jailed in 2012 – aged just 19 – for a plot to blow up the London Stock Exchange.
Giving an indeterminate sentence which meant he could be locked up for decades, the trial judge warned he could never safely be let out.
Yet just a year later three appeal judges ruled the sentence was too harsh. Instead, they handed him a fixed 16-year term.
RELEASE
That allowed him to be automatically released last December with an electronic tag, after just eight years.
And on Friday afternoon – just 11 months later – Khan taped a knife to each arm, strapped on a fake bomb vest and launched his rampage at a meeting beside London Bridge.
It only ended when he was shot in the head by terror cops, after he had knifed to death Cambridge University graduate Jack Merritt, 25, and another woman, and seriously injured three more.
In 2012, trial judge Mr Justice Wilkie said in court Khan – one of nine plotters – was “such a significant risk, the public could not be adequately protected” by freeing him on licence.
But he was overruled at appeal when the judges, including Lord Justice Leveson, accepted Khan might have been falsely “bigging up” the danger he posed.
Khan had been one of five men from Stoke who had joined with jihadis from elsewhere.
His group had talked of going to Pakistan for terror training.
Lord Leveson, sitting with Mr Justice Mitting and Mr Justice Sweeney, found the five Stoke defendants – including Khan – should not have been seen as a bigger risk than other plotters.
Khan’s defence had claimed the judge had “wrongly characterised the conduct of the Stoke defendants as having a level of sophistication such that they were more dangerous”.
They insisted what Khan and the others said was “no more than this young man ‘bigging up’ what they intended to do.”
The appeal judges ruled that although Khan and the other Stoke defendants had been intent on going to Pakistan, there was “no basis for concluding that they were in a position to put any plan (let alone terrorist training) into place”.
They added “too much weight should not be placed” on their conversations, warning: “It is not implausible some self-publicists will talk ‘big’ and other, more serious plotters, may be more careful and keep their own counsel. Suffice to say, on the question of comparative risk, we do not consider that a distinction can safely be drawn between the London and Stoke defendants.” Yesterday the wife of trial judge Justice Wilkie said he had no comment other than what was in his original judgement.
After he was sentenced, Khan wrote a letter to his lawyer saying he wanted to live his life as “a good citizen of Britain”. In the letter, obtained by ITV News, Khan asked to join a programme of deradicalisation to “prove to the authorities” that he was no longer “immature”.
He said he wanted to “learn Islam and its teachings” and “live my life as a good Muslim”. Khan had been
known to police as an Islamic extremist since the age of 14 when he became involved in street preaching, running stalls stocked with extremist posters and literature.
Born and raised in Stoke-on-trent in a British-pakstani family, he was once recorded saying: “These kuffar (non-believers), these dogs. They’ve got to be dealt with, they haven’t got the fear inside them no more man.”
He became the subject of police surveillance after becoming part of a nine-man London Stock Exchange bomb cell, which also plotted a Mumbai-style attack on London
which included a plan to assassinate Boris Johnson.
The group also spoke of bombing the addresses of two rabbis, the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and the American Embassy.
Khan told fellow plotters he dreamed of opening a terrorist training school in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, and to personally attend another overseas camp for military instruction and “terrorist experience”.
He was also a friend and disciple of hate preacher Anjem Choudary and was an activist for his proscribed terror group al-muhajiroun.