The Daily Star
Monday, December 2, 2019
By Michael Glackin
Beirut - Terror came to the streets of London again last week. Not for the first time, the murderer was known to police and the U.K.’s security services. British-born Usman Khan, who killed a man and a woman and wounded three others in a knife rampage last Friday, had been released from jail in 2018, less than seven years into a 16-year prison sentence.
The atrocity has raised the temperature in an already fractious election in the U.K., with both the main political parties blaming each other for allowing a convicted terrorist back onto the streets to commit murder.
Khan was originally sentenced to serve an indeterminate sentence - where no date is set for when the person will be released - in 2012 for an Al-Qaeda-inspired plot to bomb both the London Stock Exchange and the U.S. Embassy, as well as murder current Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was then the mayor of London.
However, in 2013 the Court of Appeal quashed that judgment, and replaced it with a determinate custodial sentence of 16 years. Khan was released just eight years into his sentence, but, because he was on what amounts to parole, had to wear an electronic monitoring device.
Clearly, no one appeared to be monitoring him all that closely.
Thus, last Friday, Khan, wearing a hoax suicide belt, showed up as an invited guest at a Cambridge University conference on prisoner rehabilitation being held in the City of London, at the historic Fishmongers’ Hall.
Once there he stabbed several people before being chased by members of the public, including a Polish chef who worked at Fishmongers’ Hall and who attacked Khan with a 1.5-meter-long tusk of a narwhal, which had previously been used to decorate a wall inside the hall. Khan was then shot by police. Video footage of his last moments show police dragging the last of the members of the public who intervened off Khan’s prostrate body before an armed officer fired several shots into him.
The stabbings happened near the site of the 2017 terrorist attack by Daesh (ISIS) supporters on London Bridge, in which eight people were killed.
There are two key issues here. One, why did this happen? Secondly, what impact will it have on this month’s general election in the U.K.?
In terms of the first, questions will be asked of the U.K.’s security agencies. A string of failings by MI5 and MI6 in the way both agencies monitor known terror suspects have been highlighted over the last decade. In 2015 I wrote that the U.K.’s intelligence and security services appeared incapable of stopping not just British nationals going to join groups in Syria and Iraq, but even known terror suspects. The Daesh executioner known as “Jihadi John,” Londoner Mohammed Emwazi, was able to escape to Syria in 2012 despite being on an MI5 terror watch list which prohibited him from leaving the U.K. In fact, Emwazi was so well-known to intelligence services and detained so often by MI5 that he actually filed a formal complaint against them with the Police Complaints Commission in 2010.
Despite extensive so-called “intrusive” surveillance by security agencies of Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, both men slipped through the intelligence net and murdered an off-duty soldier, Lee Rigby, in broad daylight on a busy London street in 2013. Adebolajo has even claimed MI5 tried to recruit him prior to the murder.
Further back, the leaders of the July 7, 2005, bombings in London, which killed 52 people, were also on the radar of the intelligence services, but again slipped through the net. After the attack, MI5 insisted two of the bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, were just “petty fraudsters.” However, at least one surveillance transcript of the pair later emerged which contained eight pages detailing plans to train for and take part in terrorist attacks.
Indeed, in 2015, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee revealed a litany of security service failures when dealing with terror groups, but little seems to have changed.
Of course, terrorism does not rely on a great amount of sophistication, or collaboration that security services can monitor. A kitchen knife or a car is pretty much all you need to kill and maim people in busy cities. But it is surely worrying that so many of these so called “lone wolf” terrorists seem able to carry out their murderous attacks despite the fact that they are already on the radar of security agencies.
The attack could have significant impact on this month’s election, which many believe is the U.K.’s most important in living memory. Following the attack, Johnson said he would toughen sentences for people convicted of violent crime and terrorism if he wins the election. Yet it was his government, in the shape of Priti Patel, the combative right-wing pro-Israeli U.K. home secretary, who at the beginning of last month reduced the U.K. terror threat level for the first time in two years.
Meanwhile, a few days prior to the attack, Jeremy Corbyn, the hard-left leader of the opposition Labour Party, refused to say whether he would give the order to “take out” (assassinate) a new Daesh leader if British security forces were in a position to do so. During a car-crash interview on BBC television, Corbyn said: “If it’s possible, and only if it’s possible, then you try to capture that person.” He later added that he would “take the appropriate decisions at that time when I knew the circumstances.” However, his reluctance to give a straight answer may come back to haunt him against the backdrop of Friday’s attack.
If all that wasn’t enough, U.S. President Donald Trump is coming to town later today. Trump disgracefully used the first London Bridge attack in 2017 to publicly criticize London’s Muslim Mayor Sadiq Khan, part of a long-running feud between the two men. Khan refused to meet Trump during his state visit to the U.K. earlier this year.
Trump is also a big fan of Johnson, whom he has dubbed “Britain’s Trump.” In October he went so far as to warn that a Corbyn victory in the election would be “so bad” for the U.K.
However, Johnson is understood to have asked Trump to stop voicing his support publicly, amid fears his endorsement is actually boosting Corbyn due to the widespread antipathy most in the U.K. feel toward the U.S. president.
It may not matter. Johnson’s Conservative Party is ahead in the polls at the moment, and looks to win comfortably and finally implement the U.K.’s exit from the European Union. Either way, whoever wins, the U.K.’s intelligence net is in need of urgent repairs.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of The Daily Star.
A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on December 02, 2019, on page 4.
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