Terror chief: Take extremists’ children away to save them

RADICAL Islamists should have their children taken away from them, Britain’s top counterterrorist officer said last night.

Scotland Yard chief Mark Rowley compared the danger faced by the children of extremists to that posed by paedophiles.

He called for police, social workers and family court judges to step in and protect the vulnerable families of Islamists.

Terrorist propaganda and sexual abuse were ‘equally wicked’ forces for youngsters, he warned in a keynote speech. But extremists were often left to care for children despite convictions for violence and spreading hate.

Mr Rowley said around 100 children have been safeguarded since the start of the battle against extremism, but more could be done. ‘The police, social services and the courts have a lot of experience of safeguarding work and taking cases through the family courts where there are paedophile parents,’ he said.

‘If we have parents showing propaganda material, does that pose a risk to children that should be treated in the same way as paedophiles?

‘It is the level of risk. If you know parents are interested in sex with children or if you know parents believe that people of their faith should hate everybody else and corrupt children for it, for me those are equally wicked environments to expose children to.’

Mr Rowley retires in March after a 31-year career, months after leading the nation’s response to five terror attacks.

The assistant commissioner warned that the threat of Islamist terrorism was here to stay despite IS’s loss of territory in Iraq and Syria. Ahead of a speech to the Policy Exchange think-tank, he said terrorist arrests rose by a third last year. Mr Rowley also warned against underestimating the threat of a resurgent far-Right, saying these extremists often want to sow the same fear and mistrust as Islamists.

He branded them a ‘toxic combination, the way they feed off each other’.

Mr Rowley added: ‘Sometimes they are pursuing the same agenda. Whatever police do we are not tackling this recruiting ground. That requires a joined-up national effort.’

Painting a stark picture of the challenge facing police and MI5, he said there were more than 600 investigations being carried out into at least 3,000 suspects. The ability of extremists to ‘ ply their trade through the internet’ remains of ‘grave concern’.

He said it ‘cannot be right’ that someone can be radicalised, exchange encrypted messages with terrorists, research targets without a trace and buy bomb materials all online.

But he added the biggest internet companies, mostly based in the US, have improved their response and he hoped smaller firms will follow suit.

He compared the efforts of Google, Facebook and Twitter to the reluctance of the banking sector to help chase out dirty money when police first asked for help.

The officer said companies are finally ‘rolling up their sleeves’ and that progress will be made by ‘persuasion and regulation’.

Asked whether the authorities have been too ‘politically correct’ to single out some groups for fostering extremism, Mr Rowley said it was a ‘sensitive’ area.

But he added: ‘I think there are times when we have been tolerant of intolerance.’

‘Equally wicked environments’