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London Stabbing Prompts Questions on Policies for Terrorism Convictions London Stabbing Prompts Questions on Policies for Terrorism Convictions
(about 7 hours later)
LONDON — The mayor of London accused the government on Monday of failing to give judges the tools they need to keep people who pose terrorist threats in prison, a day after a man who had recently been released went on a stabbing rampage in South London. LONDON — The British government proposed on Monday stopping the early release of hundreds of terrorism convicts after a succession of attacks by people let out halfway through their prison terms underscored long-festering problems with its anti-terrorist strategy.
The attacker, who wounded three people on Sunday before being shot and killed by the police, was identified by the police as Sudesh Amman, a 20-year-old from London who was jailed in 2018 for terrorism-related offenses. He was sentenced to more than three years in prison, but his early release came automatically, in line with government policy. Under the government’s extraordinary plan, about 220 people currently locked up on terrorist offenses in Britain would have their prison terms extended, said Robert Buckland, the justice secretary.
The mayor, Sadiq Khan, said he was “angry” about the government’s handling of the situation, noting that London has experienced two attacks in the past three months that were carried out by men convicted of terrorism-related offenses who had been recently released. Instead of automatically being released halfway into their sentences, as is customary for many offenders in Britain, terrorism convicts would be forced to serve at least two-thirds of their terms, he said. And even then, they would only be released with the agreement of a parole board.
On Monday, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack on the Hoop messaging app, saying the attacker was one of its “fighters.” The group has been using the messaging app since the authorities began a sustained effort to dislodge the group from Telegram, which had been their principal communication method since late 2014. But it was not clear the government’s proposal would withstand scrutiny in the courts, let alone solve a crisis that analysts said had more to do with a decade of austerity cuts to prison and probation services than with the length of sentences.
Mr. Amman was wearing a fake explosive device, a tactic that has been used in several recent attacks, including others claimed by the Islamic State. It is unclear what involvement, if any, the group had in Sunday’s attack. Britain is wrestling with the same conundrum other Western democracies have faced after terrorist attacks, including the United States and France: the tension between security and civil rights.
London has been the site of several deadly terrorist attacks in the past few years, and each one has renewed questions about whether Britain’s approach to the threat is sufficient. Legal analysts warned that human rights law prevented the British government from retroactively toughening the punishment of someone mid-sentence. And they said there is no evidence that increasing the length of someone’s time in prison reduced the risk of them committing another offense after their release.
“There’s lots of questions I’ve got for the government in relation to what they are doing to keep us safe,” Mr. Khan said in an interview with Sky News, warning that not enough was being done to prevent people convicted of terrorist offenses from carrying out attacks. The government’s aggressive plan was prompted by an attack on Sunday in south London in which Sudesh Amman, 20, was accused of stabbing two people.
“What are the government doing to make sure they are not a danger to the public?” asked Mr. Khan, who is a member of the opposition Labour Party. He pointed to revisions in the law that prevented judges from issuing indeterminate sentences to protect the public. The attack was interrupted by undercover police officers who had been tailing Mr. Amman since he was automatically released from prison last week, halfway into a three-year sentence on charges of distributing extremist material and possessing material that could be useful for preparing a terrorist attack, officials said. The undercover officers shot and killed him on the street.
Mr. Amman was released in January, having been convicted in May 2018 under the Terrorism Act. He was first arrested on suspicion of planning a terrorist attack, but was ultimately charged with ownership and distribution of terrorist propaganda and instructional manuals. There were 224 people in custody in Britain on terrorism-related offenses as of September, the latest figures from the government. “We face a threat from an ideology that takes no heed for others, and we must use every tool we can to make sure that threat is neutralized,” Mr. Buckland told lawmakers on Monday.
On Sunday, Mr. Amman was being followed on foot by armed officers — a rarity in Britain, where police are often unarmed — who were part of a counterterrorism surveillance operation. But there is some evidence that, without the government investing more in counseling and rehabilitation programs, lengthening sentences risks radicalizing people further, said Stuart Macdonald, a professor of legal studies at Swansea University.
The attack bore striking similarities to events that rattled the city just weeks earlier. In December, Usman Khan, 28, carried out an attack in central London that left two people dead. Mr. Amman’s mother, Haleema Faraz Khan, told the British broadcaster Sky News on Monday that her son watched Islamist material online and was radicalized at Belmarsh, a high-security prison housing many terrorist convicts that one former inmate described as a “jihadi training camp.”
He had been sentenced to 16 years in prison for his involvement in a bomb plot but was released after eight. He appeared to have been released automatically “on license” — meaning under certain conditions — according to the parole board, which did not review his case before his release. “He became more religious inside prison, that’s where I think he became radicalized,” Ms. Khan said.
Mr. Khan was taking part in a prison rehabilitation conference near London Bridge when he stabbed several people and fled before he was shot and killed by the police. Like Mr. Amman, he was also wearing a fake explosive vest. On Monday, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, saying on the Hoop messaging app that the attacker was one of its “fighters.” The group has been using the messaging app since the authorities began a sustained effort to dislodge the group from Telegram, which had been its principal communication method since late 2014.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in a speech in London on Monday, thanked the police for their swift response and said it was “time to take action” to ensure people convicted of terror offenses do not qualify automatically for early release. Mr. Amman was wearing a fake explosive device, a tactic that has been used in several recent attacks including others claimed by the Islamic State. It is unclear what involvement, if any, the group had in Sunday’s attack.
“We’re bringing forward legislation to stop the system of automatic early release,” he said, adding that the difficult part is figuring out “how to apply that retrospectively to the cohort of people who currently qualify.” One stabbing victim, a man in his 40s, remained in the hospital in serious but stable condition, the police said on Monday. Another victim, a woman in her 50s, was released from the hospital, as was a woman in her 20s who was struck by glass after the gunshots.
After the December attack, Mr. Johnson vowed that 74 people who had been jailed for terrorism offenses and released early would have the conditions of their release reviewed, and last month the government announced plans to toughen terrorism sentences and end early releases. But the new measures apply only to the most serious and violent offenders — Mr. Amman is not among them. The attack by Mr. Amman was the second in several months in which a terrorist convict released early under British sentencing laws went on a stabbing spree.
Mr. Amman was charged in 2018 with disseminating terrorist material and collecting information useful for terrorist attacks, after the police were alerted to his messages in the Telegram app that showed support for the Islamic State. His mother told Sky News on Monday that he was radicalized online and in prison. In November, Usman Khan, 28, who had been convicted of being part of a group that plotted to bomb London’s stock exchange, was accused of killing two people and injuring three others in an attack near London Bridge before being shot dead by the police.
When Mr. Amman was sentenced, Acting Commander Alexis Boon, head of London’s Metropolitan Police Counterterrorism Command, said the police had “recovered a plethora of evidence which not only proved Amman’s criminality but demonstrated the worrying extent of his terrorist mind set,” according to The Independent. Mr. Khan had been wearing an electronic tag after being automatically released halfway into a 16-year sentence.
A BBC reporter recalled how Mr. Amman had smiled in court at the time of his sentencing. The offense for which Mr. Amman was imprisoned made him a more typical terrorism convict, analysts said. He was sentenced in December 2018 after confessing to 13 counts of expressing support for Islamist terrorism and sharing Islamic State and Al Qaeda propaganda with his family and on social media.
The police said on Monday that two residential properties — one in South London and another in Bishop’s Stortford, about 30 miles north of the capital — had been searched, but that no arrests had been made. He sent beheading videos to his girlfriend, the authorities said, suggesting that she kill her nonbelieving parents. In a list in a notepad, the police said, Mr. Amman wrote that his top life goals was to die a martyr.
In his interview with Sky News, Mr. Khan noted that prisons were stretched to the limit and that probation services were struggling to cope with the number of released offenders. And he wrote of a terrorist attack: “If you can’t make a bomb because family, friends or spies are watching or suspecting you, take a knife, Molotov, sound bombs or a car at night and attack.”
“We’ve got roughly speaking 200-plus people convicted of terrorism in prisons now,” Mr. Khan said. “What are we doing to make sure they are being punished and reformed, rather than radicalized?” After serving half his sentence and being released last week, Mr. Amman moved into a halfway house for ex-offenders, a part of the government’s anti-terrorist response that some analysts said deserved more scrutiny than the length of their sentences.
Some ex-officials made the case on Monday for some terrorism convicts to be given indefinite sentences, even as they stressed the need for better rehabilitation services. “If the fellow shot on Sunday received an extra year in prison, I frankly don’t think that would have changed his mind,” said Clive Walker, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Leeds School of Law. Lengthening sentences was “no doubt popular, but it misses the point,” he said. “The big questions we face are: What do we do with these people in prison to make them change their mind-sets? And what do we do when people are released, because release is inevitable?”
But analysts questioned how a prison service that is already overburdened, especially after cuts made during the Conservatives’ decade-long austerity policies, would cope with extended sentences. The policy of automatically releasing some prisoners halfway into their sentences was originally intended to control a booming prison population. It was an indication of how worried the authorities were about Mr. Amman that they had him tailed by armed, undercover officers.
The government seemed poised on Monday to announce a broader crackdown on early releases. Chris Phillips, the former head of the National Counter Terrorism Security Office, said an operation like that required the work of dozens of officers. He said he could not recall another case in which undercover officers had halted a terrorist attack midway through.
Sir Mark Rowley, the former head of British counterterrorism policing, suggested on BBC Radio 4 that the government should pair indeterminate sentences with better de-radicalization programs. Echoing the views of many law enforcement officials, Mr. Phillips backed ending early releases of any kind for terrorist convicts. But he also said that austerity cuts to prison and probation services had left the authorities ill-equipped to reduce the risk of people reoffending.
“If someone is clearly driven by an ideology and they believe that slaughtering other people is a sort of God-given purpose, then I can see a case for that,” Mr. Rowley said. “As long as we put alongside it the rehabilitation and de-radicalization programs to give someone the opportunity to change their ways and be released.” Spending on prisons in 2018 was 14 percent lower than in 2010, even as the demands on prisons grew, according to the Institute for Government, an independent research group. Since those budget cuts, the number of assaults on both prisoners and staff members has gone up, and inmates’ access to rehabilitation services has been limited.
But others questioned whether the prison service was sufficiently equipped to hold terrorism convicts and prepare them for release. Putting terrorism convicts in the same prisons as organized criminals also gives terrorists better access to guns and knives after their release, Mr. Phillips said.
“I am more concerned about what happened when he was in custody,” said Ian Acheson, who led a review of Islamist extremism in prisons and the probation service several years ago. “I am still unconvinced that the prison service itself has the aptitude or the attitude to assertively manage terrorist offenders.” “What we’ve got is terrorists who’ve always found it quite difficult to get ahold of weapons mixing with armed organized crime groups that have loads of weapons,” he said. “This is a succession of governments that have let the public down on criminal justice.”
Rukmini Callimachi contributed reporting. The measures proposed on Monday fit with Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s approach on criminal justice. The government has put forward measures that emphasized longer jail terms for violent and terrorist offenders, and opened the door to increased monitoring in some cases after their release.
A counterterrorism act passed last year already raised the maximum sentences for some offenses. But some urged the government to go further: Lord Carlile, a member of the House of Lords, suggested on Monday that the government reintroduce so-called control orders that allow the home secretary to put released convicts under virtual house arrest, a measure scrapped years ago for being too harsh.
But the prospect of stiffening penalties for offenses like Mr. Amman’s — not planning an attack, but having and distributing terrorist material — alarmed some analysts, especially given how young many offenders are.
“If you set the bar too low, you create a license for just arresting and imprisoning endless number of fanatics and inadequates, rather than individuals who are actively engaged in wanting to harm people,” said Richard Garside, the director of the Center for Crime and Justice Studies in London. “Few things are more likely to radicalize and alienate someone than being put in prison because of things he believes, but hasn’t done.”
Rukmini Callimachi, Megan Specia and Jane Bradley contributed reporting.