Murderous rampage is evidence enough that something is wrong
been jailed for 16 years for his role in a plot to blow up the London Stock Exchange, as well as the fact that he was a close associate of Anjem Choudary, the notorious Islamist hate preacher.
Then there is the issue of why, given the seriousness of the charges on which Khan was convicted in 2012, he was released after serving less than half his sentence inside.
Another depressing feature of Britain’s response to the modern-day curse of Islamist-inspired terrorism since the September 11 2001 attacks has been the strong resistance that successive governments, dating back to the Blair era, have encountered from the judiciary whenever they have sought to put more robust measures in place to safeguard the security of ordinary, law-abiding citizens.
The lenient treatment meted out to Khan is a case in point. In 2012, following his conviction for an al-Qaeda-inspired plot to attack the London Stock Exchange, the American embassy and the home of Boris Johnson, who was then the mayor of London, the trial judge warned that Khan was a “serious jihadist” who should not be released so long as he remained a threat to the general public.
But the Court of Appeal quashed the indeterminate sentence in 2013, and gave him a 16-year jail sentence, with the stipulation that he serve at least eight years. Then, says the Parole Board, he “appears to have been released automatically on licence”.
The failure to control the danger posed by Khan is indicative of a broader miscalculation within Whitehall at the scale of the threat the country continues to face from jihadi groups, which was most recently reflected in the Government’s surprise decision to reduce the terror threat level from “severe” to “substantial” last month. Khan’s murderous rampage is evidence that something is going wrong – and the next government will face angry demands to fix it.