The Home Office should have been honest with us ... if only we’d known we could have stopped him
A devastating interview with the foster couple who took Tube bomber in – and showered him with love
AS a foster couple for 47 years, Ron and Penny Jones knew the little touches to help a troubled, frightened child feel just that little bit more comfortable when arriving in their home. A night light to chase away the scary shadows for the little ones. A treasured photograph on a bedside table for the older ones. Knowing when to comfort and when to hold back. When to scold and when to hug. They were skills that could not be taught – they came from experience, empathy and love.
So when Ahmed Hassan, who said he was a 16-year-old Iraqi refugee with a terrible past, came under their care in April 2016, naturally they did everything they could to make him feel welcome and secure.
They bought him halal meat, they showed him the local mosque. They even asked his permission before putting up Christmas decorations. And gradually he seemed to blossom into a loving, lovable young lad.
Mrs Jones, a 71-year-old former prison worker, remembers: ‘He’d always told us his parents were dead. His mum was killed in the crossfire during the hunt for Saddam Hussein and his dad’s taxi was blown up in front of him, and he was captured by IS.
‘He had an awful mark on his arm, a tattoo with numbers, which he kept picking at and cutting, and trying to get rid of, which he said was where he was branded by IS. At first he was very quiet and wouldn’t come and join us, he would just sit in his bedroom. We said, “How are you going to get better if you’re sitting up here on your own all the time?” Then he started coming down, watching football and things.
‘He seemed like the loveliest boy we could have asked for – he was polite, helpful. He was as good as gold.’
Her husband, an 89-year- old former warehouse worker, agrees: ‘He seemed a great lad. I’d only have to say, “Ahmed, could you give us a hand with this?” and he was there. We used to tease each other and muck about.’ On their 48th wedding anniversary, he gave his foster carers a card saying: ‘You are now my English parents.’
Yet behind the mask, the quiet, polite teenager was a would-be IS assassin who saw it as his ‘duty’ to hate Britain.
Mr and Mrs Jones didn’t attend court during his trial and weren’t there to see Hassan convicted but yesterday, speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail, the couple who were awarded MBEs in 2010 for their services to fostering, told of betrayal and shock – both at the boy they’d grown to love as a son, but also at the Home Office for knowingly sending an IS fighter to live under their roof without warning them.
Mrs Jones said: ‘I don’t think social services even realised because they never told us. If they had been aware they would have said something to us. The Home Office should have been honest. He still needed somewhere to live, he still needed to be looked after, but I would have liked to have known because we could’ve been looking out for signs of radicalisation. It feels like a total betrayal. I can’t believe he would do something like that. I’m just so grateful he didn’t succeed.’
Her husband added: ‘If we’d known, we could have been more watchful. I still can’t believe he did it. He seemed like such a good kid.’
The couple, who have two sons, Spencer, 44, and Leonard, 46, four children from Ron’s first marriage, an adopted daughter, 13 grandchildren and seven great grandchildren, are no novices when it comes to fostering. They’ve offered sanctuary to 269 children at their three-bedroom terraced home in Sunbury- onThames, Surrey. The youngest a baby, the eldest a 21-year-old. One lad arrived demanding £25 before smashing up a social services office. Another ripped a door off its hinges because he was on drugs.
Mrs Jones said: ‘ All the kids I’ve had have had their problems. They wouldn’t be in care if they hadn’t. And they’ve all come from such horrendous backgrounds.
He always told us his parents were dead
‘They just need someone to be sympathetic, give them some love and care. And that’s all I want to do.’
The couple were drawn to caring for refugees and have housed youngsters from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Eritrea. They even decided in 2010 to stop fostering British children because they felt refugees needed them more.
Hassan came to them after another of their wards, a Syrian refugee called Yahyah Farroukh, who was at school with Hassan – then living on his own – said he really needed their help. ‘We were told he had mental health problems and had been in hospital. A tutor at the school was concerned that he might do something stupid, so we agreed to take him on.’
Their desire to help was deepened when they heard about his journey to the UK from Baghdad. He’d risked his life in a rickety boat from Turkey to Greece, before travelling through Italy and France and ending up at the Calais Jungle.
At first Hassan seemed to be making progress. He was prescribed Prozac for his depression but refused to take it. He also received fortnightly counselling on the NHS and attended a monthly group session.
That Christmas he casually dismissed his foster parents’ concerns about Christmas decorations, saying: ‘I’ve come to live in a Christian country, I have to accept it.’
Mrs Jones said: ‘ We even bought him Christmas presents. He was absolutely thrilled. We got him some bits for college, some clothes, and the Lynx shower gel he really loved.
‘And at Eid I’d given him money to buy new clothes.’
He excelled in his studies at Brooklands College, Surrey. Mrs Jones said Hassan was even offered places at several universities including University College London, Bath, Bristol.
‘He was really good at college, everybody sang his praises,’ she said. ‘He won a prize for being the most improved student.’
Mr Jones added, with some irony: ‘He was a perfectionist. The only thing he slipped up on was with this bomb – thank God.’
Then things started to sour, with Hassan showing some disturbing behaviour which the couple just attributed to his past.
Mrs Jones said: ‘ We’d had a few words as he was getting regular phone calls at 2am. They stopped
How the hell didn’t I notice something?
but I then noticed he was getting up at 2am and going outside for a walk. Six or eight weeks before this kicked off there was something on the news about a bombing in Baghdad and he got very upset. I tried to talk to him but he just went and walked for most of the night. He came back at three or 4am.’
On another occasion, Hassan had told her he was ‘ bored’ and announced he was going to visit friends in Cardiff. Later that afternoon he vanished and was missing for more than a week.
They treated Hassan like a son and took him on a holiday to Warmwell, Dorset, last July. He was due to join them on a caravan holiday in Blackpool just two weeks before the Parsons Green attack, but he decided against it at the last minute.
Mrs Jones said: ‘The night before we left I asked if he’d packed his stuff and he said, “No I’m not going.” I asked why not and he said it was because my son had a dog. He said: “I’m not going where there are any dogs because they’re dirty animals.” So I had to ring around asking people to come and check on him every day to make sure he was all right while we were away.
‘I phoned him every day and he seemed fine. He asked if we were enjoying ourselves and said he’d been to the pictures and to see friends.’
She became concerned only when she found out he had not gone to college on the day of the attack.
‘That’s when alarm bells started ringing,’ she said. ‘I called the police and reported him missing. The next thing, we were watching TV, when the house phone rang and a voice said: “Your house is surrounded by armed police, put everything down and get out now!”’ Mr Jones remembers peeking through the curtains and seeing a masked police officer pointing a gun through the window. ‘I asked the police if Ahmed had done something stupid and they said yes. We were absolutely horrified. My legs were shaking.’
They were forced out of their home and went to stay with relatives for four weeks while police searched the property for explosives. All of their drains had to be removed because gunpowder had been washed down the sinks.
Mrs Jones said: ‘This has knocked us for six. And it’s the longest period in over 40 years that I’ve been without a child in my house.’
Every day since September, they’ve looked back wondering if they’d missed something.
Mr Jones said: ‘I keep thinking about it. How the hell didn’t I notice something? That he could make a thing like that, in our home, without us knowing? I have been blaming myself but I’ve had nothing to be suspicious of. But had he been planning it all along or was it a spur of the moment thing?’
His wife’s feelings are just as conflicted. ‘I can only say he betrayed me,’ she said. ‘And out of the 269 kids we’ve had, he’s the only one I can say that about. I always do my utmost for the kids, whether I get on with them or not.’
The couple used to give Hassan £180 a fortnight in cash for clothes, food, phone bills and travel. Mrs Jones shudders when she realises it was this money he used to buy the chemicals for the bomb.
‘He used to have stuff delivered to the house from Amazon. One time he received a package and I asked what it was. He said it was something for his PlayStation, but now I know it was something you put in a bomb to trigger it.’
The police have been helping them piece together the true picture of the troubled young man they’d loved like a son. ‘They told us that sometimes IS recruits can come over here and lay dormant for three or four years before carrying out an attack and nobody would suspect anything. I really don’t know if that was his plan.’
Both are beginning to doubt the backstory that provoked their sympathies. Mrs Jones said: ‘Now I’ve heard all these other bits and pieces there are doubts there. I am beginning to think, are his parents even dead?
‘Now I think that perhaps he was sent here on a mission. This makes it bad for all the other kids that want to come over here. There are minors on their own in refugee camps who need to be looked after.’
Although both admit they will be more wary about taking children in, nothing will stop them opening their home to refugees. Mrs Jones said: ‘These kids need support, and someone needs to support them.’ Nevertheless, she thinks Hassan deserved to be jailed for 30 years. She said: ‘The police said if the bomb had gone off when it should, it would have been in a tunnel and it would’ve taken out two carriages. And we would’ve had to live with that.
‘We would have had to live, knowing it had been done in our house without our knowledge, and that people had died as a result.
‘It’s bad enough that people got burnt, and I feel terribly sorry for those people. I want them all to know that I knew nothing about it, and I’m horrified.
‘They’ve obviously gone through an awful lot of trauma because of this. And so have we.’
A Surrey County Council spokesman said: ‘We’re sorry Mr and Mrs Jones feel we didn’t support them well enough but we told them about Hassan’s background at the time he was placed with them.
‘We place a high value on openness with all our foster carers, share information about any risks with them from the outset and continue to keep them informed. This was our approach with Mr and Mrs Jones and our social workers also gave them regular updates.
‘Supporting Mr and Mrs Jones continues to be a priority for us as we acknowledge this has been a very difficult time for them.’