London Bridge attacker Usman Khan swore he wasn’t a Islamic terrorist in BBC interview

London Bridge attacker Usman Khan swore he wasn’t a Islamic terrorist in BBC interview

The 28-year-old Islamist terrorist who was shot dead by police after murdering two people on London Bridge last Friday swore in a BBC report nearly a dozen years ago that he was not a terrorist. Roughly four years after giving that interview, he was convicted for his role in a terrorist plot to bomb the London Stock Exchange. But remember, “I ain’t no terrorist,” said the terrorist:

Astoundingly, following that conviction, Khan was released from prison on an expedited time table. Why? Because he’d become, according to authorities, a model case (or a “poster boy”) for a British rehabilitation program – via The Telegraph:

Learning Together, a Cambridge University programme, worked with Usman Khan in prison and after his release and used him as a case study to show how they helped prisoners. Khan even wrote a poem and a thank-you note to organisers after they provided him with a computer he could use without breaching a licence that banned him from going online.

Next comes the grim punchline:

“Just months later the 28-year-old used his connection to the rehabilitation initiative to get permission to travel to London and kill two of those people who were trying to help him.”

He said he wasn’t a terrorist, then he was convicted of terrorism offenses, then convinced the system that he was no longer a threat, then committed a terrorist act, stabbing five people while wearing a realistic-looking but fake suicide vest. A comprehensive failure. With the UK general election less than a week-and-a-half away, this incident has become a political flashpoint. The opposition obviously blames the conservative government as responsible under the buck-stops-here principle. But there’s a…small complication with that line of attack:

The 28 year-old was initially sentenced to an indeterminate sentence for public protection — a measure introduced by the Labour government in 2005 — for his part in an all-Qaeda-inspired plot to bomb the London Stock Exchange and establish a terrorist training camp. The Imprisonment for Public Protection regime was later scrapped by the Conservative-led coalition in 2012.

Khan was convicted in February 2012, before the indeterminate sentence was abolished. Yvette Cooper, who served as shadow home secretary from 2011-2015, questioned in a series of tweets why he had been released from prison and said the government had been “warned” against ending IPPs. Priti Patel, the Conservative Home Secretary, hit back saying that the law had been changed “to end Labour’s automatic release policy” and blamed Labour for introducing the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act in 2008.

Radical left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose party implemented the automatic parole eligibility provisions that led to Khan’s release, has questioned the decisions of the parole board.

Source: Town Hall