Hate preacher warned Islamist radicals were being groomed in jail
HATE preacher Anjem Choudary openly discussed how prison helped to radicalise inmates almost a decade before jail links between his former henchman and the Reading terror attacker were revealed.
Last week Libyan refugee Khairi Saadallah was sentenced to die in jail for stabbing three men to death in a park in a terror rampage.
The former Islamist militia fighter shouted “Allahu akbar” as he knifed friends James Furlong, 36, David Wails, 49, and Joseph Ritchiebennett, 39, in just 10 seconds last summer. He attempted to murder three other men.
During his sentencing hearing at London’s Old Bailey it was revealed by a prison officer at HMP Bullingdon in Oxfordshire that Saadallah, 26, had been “keen to talk to and associate with” radical Abu Izzadeen, also known as Omar Brooks, who has links to Anjem Choudary’s banned al-muhajiroun extremist network.
Saadallah was described by the officer as “impressionable and volatile”, and was observed regularly attending Friday prayers and the gym with Brooks, 45, while serving together in 2017.
Speaking in a 2012 interview never heard before, Choudary, now 53, described how a number of radicals set to be released in the UK had been groomed by convicted terrorists.
Considered Britain’s most notorious Islamist, Choudary was recorded saying: “They are locking up, long term, people that are already radicalised. If you are going to lock them up with a host of other prisoners that are already hardened criminals... you have a very volatile situation.”
Choudary went on: “If these people come out they are not worried about the police. Now they have an ideology, now they have a purpose.
“A lot of the people associated with [almuhajiroun] over the years are ex-prisoners.
“People in prison have longer to think about things and reflect.they are looking for a purpose in life.they have time to listen to people.”
Saadallah was given a whole life sentence after he pleaded guilty to three counts of murder, as well as the attempted murders of Stephen Young, Patrick Edwards and Nishit Nisudan.
He had been released from Bullingdon two
weeks before the attack, after serving a 17-month sentence for affray and assault.
Last week the Henry Jackson Society thinktank questioned why Brooks had been placed with vulnerable prisoners instead of in the separation centres created a year earlier to stop Islamist prisoners radicalising others.
Brooks, a former BT electrician, was known as Choudary’s long-standing supporter.
Brooks was jailed in 2008 for funding and inciting terrorism, and was sent back to jail in 2016 over suspicions he was planning to travel to Syria. He was released in 2018 and is believed to be living in east London. Choudary was jailed for inviting support for Islamic State in 2016 but was released on licence, also in 2018.