DOZENS OF TERRORISTS RELEASED EARLY IN UK
▶ Authorities to review 74 militants to ensure they do not pose threat like Friday’s London Bridge attacker
The UK is reviewing the status of 74 convicted terrorists freed early from prison after a knife attack in London on Friday by an Al Qaeda sympathiser released halfway through a 16year jail term.
Boris Johnson, the prime minister, said the 74 were “being properly invigilated to make sure there’s no threat” as the issue of security shot up the agenda before national elections on December 12.
Mr Johnson has criticised a previous Labour Party-led government for bringing in laws that allowed the automatic early release of Usman Khan, who killed two people in Friday’s attack after serving eight years for plotting to bomb the London Stock Exchange and other targets in 2012.
Changes to the law meant that he was automatically released in December last year after only eight years, taking into account days he had spent behind bars before he was convicted.
He was released on an electronic tag to monitor his movements with an “extensive” list of licence conditions, according to police. He was thought to be complying with them.
He wore a fake suicide vest and used knives in his attack on Friday at an event celebrating the successful rehabilitation of prisoners. Khan was shot dead by police after being stopped by members of the public.
“It is repulsive that individuals as dangerous as this man should be allowed out after serving only eight years and that’s why we are going to change the law,” Mr Johnson told the BBC.
“The key issue is that he was allowed out early. Legally there was no way of stopping him from coming out earlier.”
The father of Jack Merritt, 25, the first named victim of the attack, said on Saturday that he did not want his son’s death to “be used as the pretext for more draconian sentences or for detaining people unnecessarily”.
The second victim was identified last night as Saskia Jones, 23, a former University of Cambridge student. The family of Jones said that she had wanted to work with victims of crime and had applied to the police.
Mr Johnson said he would make prison sentences tougher in light of Friday’s terrorist attack but faced criticisms from the opposition that funds to prisons and police were slashed as part of a decade-long austerity drive by the
Conservative-led government. Ian Acheson, a former prison governor who was commissioned by the government to write a report on extremism in British jails, said he found a system that was a “shambles”.
He said the case of Usman Khan “will be an organisational catastrophe that no amount of bureaucratic evasion can fix”.
He wrote in The Sunday Times that his review found “serious deficiencies in almost every aspect of the management of terrorist offenders through the system that are relevant to Usman Khan”.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said he believed convicted terrorists should “not necessarily” serve their full prison terms, suggesting it would depend on the nature of their sentence and also how they had behaved in prison.
“It depends on the circumstances, it depends on the sentence, but crucially it depends on what they’ve done in the prison,” Mr Corbyn told Sky News.
Mr Corbyn, who had faced criticism after saying that he would have preferred ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi to have been taken alive, said that police had no choice on Friday but to shoot dead the attacker.