Teacher: Experts ignored warnings on Amess killer
A TEACHER has revealed her dismay at officials from the Government’s deradicalisation programme shrugging off her concerns about the extremist who went on to murder Tory MP David Amess.
She described how Ali Harbi Ali went from a bright pupil to a fanatic whose eyes had become ‘dead’. The teacher was so alarmed that she referred Ali to Prevent but was later told he was not deemed a threat.
Ali, 25, was last week given a whole life sentence after being convicted of stabbing 69-year-old father-of-three Sir David at his Southend West constituency surgery in last April. In an interview with Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, the teacher says: ‘He [Ali] was very, very bright and very well behaved. He had a great future... As we hit the upper years of the sixth form, his academic performance started to plummet.
‘He was preoccupied with particular aspects of Islam. It’s almost as if a light had gone out and his eyes were dead. I just got this gut reaction something was wrong.’
She alerted Prevent officials but was told two workers had assessed Ali as carrying no risk. ‘They just said, “We don’t think he’s a threat. We don’t think he’s worth taking on any further.” That was it.’
Tomorrow’s programme reveals that half of the terror attacks carried out in Britain in the past five years were committed by extremists who received mentoring on the Prevent scheme.
The Old Bailey heard how Ali was determined to punish MPs who had voted for air strikes on Syria. He considered attacks on various politicians, including Michael Gove, but eventually targeted Sir David.
After Ali was sentenced last week, Sir David’s family said: ‘It breaks our heart to know that our husband and father would have greeted the murderer with a smile of friendship and would have been anxious to help.’
The Government says Prevent has deradicalised 3,000 individuals since 2006. But Jonathan Hall, its independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, tells the programme: ‘There is no evidence that our deradicalisation programmes work.’