The Tube bomber: a “duty” to hate Britain

“Bored, bored, bored, bored...” Those were the words that Ahmed Hassan scrawled on his bedroom door last summer, around the time he began building a bomb at his foster home in Surrey, said The Independent. A few weeks later, Hassan – the 18-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker who was convicted of attempted murder last week – carried that bomb onto a London Underground train in a Lidl bag and waited until the carriage had filled up. He got off the train at Putney Bridge, before the bomb partly detonated. Had it gone off fully, scores of people could have been killed at Parsons Green station, on 15 September. Instead, the explosion created a fireball that ripped through the carriage. In court, survivors described being lacerated by flying glass, and being horribly burnt as the fire singed their hair and melted their clothes.

Could boredom really have been a motive for such a hideous crime, asked the Daily Mail. In court, Hassan claimed that he’d not wanted to kill anyone. He said that he was depressed, and was seeking attention and thrills: he’d watched Mission: Impossible films and had developed fantasies of being a fugitive pursued by Interpol across Europe. Prosecutors argued that he also harboured an intense loathing of the UK, which he blamed for his father’s death in an explosion in Iraq a decade ago. Yet he’d chosen to come to Britain, and since arriving illegally in 2015 in the back of a lorry, he’d been offered every chance to build a life here. He had been given a home with a foster couple who “showered” him with love, and he was getting the education he said he’d dreamt of when working as a labourer in his home country. He seemed to be flourishing: last year, he was made student of the year at his college in Surrey. His prize was a £20 Amazon voucher. He used it to buy chemicals for his bomb, which he then packed with knives, screwdrivers and nails.

Hassan should never have slipped through the net, said The Sunday Times. He told immigration officials he’d been seized by Islamic State and “trained to kill” (in court he claimed that he’d made this up to elicit sympathy). His behaviour raised red flags too: he was seen watching extremist videos and apparently sending money to Isis. He told one of his teachers that he had a “duty to hate Britain”. He was referred to Prevent, the deradicalisation programme, which clearly didn’t work. Social services didn’t even warn his foster parents about his extremist leanings. This was a “collective failure” that nearly led to a devastating loss of life, and it needs explaining.