To catch a jihadi

My taxi was about 90 seconds behind the murderers who struck on London Bridge last week. My wife and I saw their victims on the road. It made no sense until we stopped and got out. Then with horror we realised what we were witnessing.

As everyone has already said, the emergency services’ response was flawless. A police 4×4 screeched up behind and two officers jumped out with submachine-guns. Within minutes, we learnt afterwards, the jihadis had been shot dead — but only after they had killed eight people, and injured scores more.

Hundreds of others will have been on that bridge or in Borough Market. I suspect all of us will be thanking the police, but also wondering how it came to this. Britain has been hit three times in three months: a sign, surely, of a lapse in our defences. And not by mystery killers either. One, Khuram Butt, had featured in a Channel 4 documentary called The Jihadis Next Door, and another was on a European terror watch-list. No wonder so many are saying that the British government has failed in its most basic duty: to keep people safe.

Theresa May said that the nature of the threat is becoming ‘more complex’ and ‘more hidden’. This doesn’t ring true. The attack on London Bridge wasn’t planned by a sophisticated network, but by thugs armed with hire cars and knives. Khuram Butt was filmed kneeling reverently in front of a black Islamist flag — not at some secret jihadi gathering, but in Regent’s Park.

Just in case MI5 weren’t watching the Channel 4 documentary, Butt was reported to the authorities by the Quilliam Foundation, who released an indignant press release after his killing spree. In a violent scuffle at a public event in July last year, it said, he had branded their researcher, Dr Usama Hasan, an ‘apostate’ who took ‘government money to spy on Muslims’.