£50k aid for open prison plea terrorist

A JIHADI who plotted to bomb British shopping centres has launched a £50,000 taxpayer-funded human rights fight to be sent to open prison.

Jawad Akbar, 36, was jailed for life in 2007 for planning fertiliser bomb atrocities at shopping malls, including Bluewater in Kent, at nightclubs and in Britain’s domestic gas network.

He is held at The Mount closed jail in Hertfordshire but is due for release in 18 months. And he says authorities refuse to move him to an open prison to help him prepare for that freedom.

It is believed he has legal aid for his three-day High Court hearing, with experts putting the cost at £50,000.

A security source said: “It is horrifying that a convicted terrorist can complain that he wants to be in an open prison and it costs vast sums

from the public purse.”

Impacts

His legal team say a ban on switching to an open prison is unfair “because he is less likely to secure his liberty in September 2021 if he does not have the opportunity to have his reduction of risk ‘tested’ in open conditions”.

They add the ban “impacts on his personal autonomy and his ability to develop relations, including with his family, and this falls within the broad ambit of the right to respect for private and family life”.

Italy-born Akbar, of Crawley, West Sussex, will be deported once he is released.

He was radicalised by British hate preacher Anjem Choudary’s Al-muhajiroun terror network.

Akbar and four fellow jihadis were jailed for the al Qaeda-ordered bomb plot that was foiled by police in 2004.

More than 1,300 pounds of fertilizer that can be used in bombmaking was seized from a storage unit in West London.

In 2016 Choudary was jailed for five years and six months for inviting others to support Islamic State.

He was released automatically on licence in October last year.

There’ll be kids in school now with same views Khan had