Disguised IS fighters shot journo dead
Teen guilty of planning murder Warning signs were ignored
A BRITISH filmmaker was shot dead by Islamic State militants who entered a compound in Syria in disguise, an inquest heard.
Mehmet Aksoy, 32, had joined the Kurds as a press officer after travelling to Kurdistan last June.
He was covering efforts to retake the city of Raqqa from IS when he was shot six times last September.
Militants entered a Kurdish People’s Protection Unit site wearing the uniforms of their allies, the Syrian Democratic Forces.
Mr Aksoy, Luton, Beds, died of a gunshot wound to the chest, North London coroners court heard.
Ruling he was unlawfully killed, the coroner said: “There is no doubt that when firing, the person intended to kill.”
POLICE chiefs have apologised for missing chances to stop a teenage terrorist before he planted a bomb on the London Underground.
More than 50 people were injured when the device left by Ahmed Hassan, 18, partially exploded causing a fireball at Parsons Green last September.
The Iraqi asylum-seeker was yesterday found guilty by an Old Bailey jury of plotting death and destruction under the nose of the antiterrorism Prevent scheme, which had monitored him.
Surrey Police and Crime Commissioner David Munro said: “Clearly there were opportunities missed... that is very worrying.”
Ben Wallace, the security minister at the Home Office, pictured right, added: “It is clear there are some lessons to be learned in this case.”
It emerged Hassan’s college mentor contacted Prevent after he said it was his “duty to hate Britain”, and he had received a WhatsApp message about an ISIS donation.
Katie Cable became concerned again just two months before the bombing when he texted her: “But your country continues to bomb my people.”
Then in early September he told her: “It’s almost better to be back in Iraq. It’s better to die because you have heaven.”
Hassan’s foster parents Penny and Ron Jones MBE also got in touch with Surrey social services amid “significant concerns” for his mental health during the summer of 2015. They had taken in Hassan, who went on to study media and photography in Weybridge, Surrey. But although appearing “shy and polite” he harboured anger at Britain for bombing Iraq. It was while they were on holiday in Blackpool that he assembled the ingredients for the bomb in his bedroom in Sunbury, Surrey. It can now be revealed that Hassan harboured fantasies inspired by Tom Cruise movie Mission: Impossible. He told a psychologist he imagined going on the run, pursued by Interpol like Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt. He had already told Home Office immigration officials he had been “trained how to kill” by ISIS when he arrived in Britain in the back of a lorry in 2015.
A jury took just over four hours to find Hassan guilty of attempted murder on what Mr Justice Haddon-Cave said was “overwhelming evidence”. Commander Dean Haydon, head of Scotland Yard’s Counter Terrorism Command, said: “I describe Hassan as intelligent and articulate, devious and cunning.
“On the one hand he was appearing to engage with the programme but he kept secret what he was planning and plotting.”
Had Hassan’s bomb, packed with screwdrivers, knives, nuts and bolts, fully detonated it could have caused carnage. He used 400g of the explosive dubbed Mother of Satan because it is so unstable, which had killed 22 in the Manchester Arena bomb in May 2017.
Hassan will be sentenced next Friday.
It is clear there are some lessons to be learned in this case
BEN WALLACE SECURITY MINISTER