Terrorism

Wednesday

Richard Ekins

How the crackdown on terrorists can avoid the Human Rights Act trap

Some human rights lawyers have warned that emergency legislation to prevent automatic early release of convicted terrorists – confirmed by Boris Johnson at Prime Minister’s Questions today – may be unlawful and will be challenged in the courts. But the warning should not deter Parliament from enacting this legislation. It is for Parliament, not the courts, to decide how best to protect the public and how to treat convicted terrorists fairly. In the wake of Sunday’s terrorist attack in Streatham, attention has rightly turned to the scandal of automatic early release of highly dangerous terrorists. Sudesh Amman, the Streatham attacker, had been released from custody in late January, having served

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

How the Streatham terrorist exploited a loophole in our knife laws

When I worked at Lidl, there were a few products that we took extra care with. Some of these were high-value goods at risk of being stolen (like the £100 laptop we once sold, causing biblical scenes of chaos in the middle aisle). Others were to comply with laws on selling dangerous goods. Knives were always locked up behind the till. In Lidl’s Tooting branch, in a relatively rough area near Streatham, the knives were all taken out of their boxes and locked up in the managers’ office. To purchase, you’d have to show ID and wait at a till as a manager brought back the knife. So how was

Monday

Katy Balls

Emergency terror laws set to end early prisoner release

The government has this afternoon unveiled its response to the Streatham terrorist incident on Sunday – which saw a man recently released for terror offences stab civilians in south London. Speaking in the Chamber, Justice Secretary Robert Buckland said that the government will table emergency legislation to end automatic early release for convicted terrorists. Under the plans, terror offenders will only be considered for release if they have served two-thirds of their sentence rather than half and then it will be subject to the approval of the parole board. Crucially, this will retrospectively end automatic early release for 220 convicted terrorists who are currently behind bars. Explaining the decision, Buckland

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Streatham terror attack reveals a failure within our prisons

The Streatham attack, again, highlights the problem of what to do with those convicted of terror offences. Longer sentences are, obviously, part of the answer. One of the purposes of prison is to keep those who are a danger to the public off the streets. Letting those convicted of terror offences out early doesn’t fit with that. It is absurd that someone can plead guilty in November 2018 to possessing and disseminating jihadi materials and then be released in January 2020. But the other issue is what is going on inside our prisons. It is all too clear that Suddesh Amman did not come out of prison deradicalised. Neither did

Sunday

Tali Fraser

Streatham terror incident: what we know

A terrorist recently released from prison has been shot dead by undercover police in Streatham, south London, after stealing a kitchen knife from a shop and stabbing three people, one of whom one is in a critical condition. Sudesh Amman, jailed for distributing terrorist materials two years ago, was wearing a fake suicide vest when he was shot by the undercover officers who had been following him. There are reports that Amman, 20, kept a notebook where he wrote of his ambition to “die as a shuhada [martyr]”: he seems to have struck days after his early released. He had served half of his three-year sentence. Gunshots were heard on

Thursday

Charles Moore

Six weeks is too long for an election campaign

The number of parties represented in national election debate multiplies. There are now seven crowding on to television podiums and local hustings. Yet this impression of diversity is, like the current public policy use of that word, misleading. Five of the parties — Labour, Liberal Democrats, Greens, SNP and Plaid Cymru — are essentially the same. They see achieving Remain, growing the state and destroying the Tories as the most important causes. The Brexit party is merely an epiphenomenon of Tory Brexit weakness and is therefore passing into history. So it is the Conservatives vs the rest, and ‘the rest’ includes all the broadcast media. This was particularly apparent in

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Terror in London, Trump in London and a resignation in Malta

Home Usman Khan, aged 28, out of prison on licence after serving eight years of a 16-year sentence for preparing acts of terrorism, stabbed to death Jack Merritt, aged 25, and Saskia Jones, aged 23, at Fishmongers’ Hall and wounded three others before being stopped on London Bridge by members of the public and shot dead by police. A Polish kitchen worker called Lukasz Koczocik tried to disarm him with a pole; another man grabbed a narwhal tusk from the wall at the hall where Khan had been attending a conference on rehabilitation while a third let off a fire extinguisher to distract him from further bloodshed. One man who

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Who are we kidding – of course terror is a political issue

It was pleasing to see that old clip of Gerry Adams endorsing Jeremy Corbyn re-emerge, just before the acts of carnage were carried out at London Bridge. It reminded us all, should we have needed to be reminded, of Jeremy’s genial relationship with terrorists who murder British citizens (or indeed Israeli citizens). The question, I suppose, is: will it sway any opinions? You would doubt it, such is the kind of deranged certitude in which the his supporters bask, where everything bad about Mr Corbyn has actually been made up by Boris Johnson, or people like me. Even as the first reports of the atrocity were coming in, Corbyn’s Momentum

Wednesday

Ian Acheson

Usman Khan’s time in prison could hold the key to explaining his murderous attack

London Bridge terrorist Usman Khan appears to have spent some of his final months behind bars at HMP Whitemoor, a high-security prison near Peterborough, where some of the country’s most dangerous people are held. The prison’s chequered history could be relevant to the horrific events that unfolded in the capital last week. I last visited Whitemoor near the beginning of 2016. This ‘new build’ prison, finished in 1992 with space for around 450 inmates, was designed to be escape proof. Two years later, five IRA terrorists and a gangster brutally disabused this notion by escaping over the perimeter wall armed with a gun that had been smuggled into the ‘supermax’ special

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Only fitfully funny: Chris Morris’s The Day Shall Come reviewed

The Day Shall Come is a second feature from British satirist Chris Morris and like the first, Four Lions, it is a ‘comedy of terrors’, you could say. But this time, rather than a group of hapless home-grown Muslim suicide bombers we’ve decamped to America and it’s the FBI that will do anything to get their man even if that man is harmless and insists that God speaks to him through a duck. It is funny, fitfully, but it asks us to laugh at someone I wasn’t sure we should be laughing at, plus it is repetitive and acts like we didn’t get the joke the first time, when we

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Tables turned | 27 June 2019

It can’t be easy to find yourself on the other end of the microphone when you’re a journalist of the calibre of Emily Maitlis. You know all the pitfalls, how easy it is to be teased out of your bunker, to say more than you ever intended under the scrutiny of an ambitious, driven interviewer with a keen nose for a story. In One to One on Radio 4, though, it was surprising to hear the ultra-cool Newsnight presenter almost in tears as she recalled covering the Manchester Arena bomb and the Grenfell fire. We could hear her voice catching, the tears welling up, her words stuttering as she tried

Colin Freeman

Alms for arms

In the rush to declare Isis dead now that its caliphate has been routed from Iraq and Syria, it’s easy to forget that its Nigerian fellow traveller, Boko Haram, is still going strong. April’s five-year anniversary of the Chibok schoolgirls’ kidnapping, for example, passed with barely a celebrity tweet to mark it, despite the fact that 112 of the girls are still missing. Nor is much fuss likely to be made next month, when an insurgency that has killed nearly 30,000 will enter its second decade as violent as ever. Out of sight and out of mind, Boko Haram’s power is growing. And to find out why, all you have

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Up close and personal | 2 May 2019

‘Can you fly down this evening?’ she was asked by her boss in the Delhi office of the BBC. ‘Yes, of course. I have to,’ replied Ayeshea Perera, a Sri Lankan journalist. She was talking from Colombo to David Amanor of the World Service’s The Fifth Floor, which looks at current news stories from the perspective of those intimately involved with them and is always worth catching for its alternative, less formal approach and Amanor’s gentle probing to find the real story. Perera described the chaos on arriving at the airport in the Sri Lankan capital on the evening of Easter Day and the weirdness of going to see the

Thursday

The Spectator

What Isis wants

It has become commonplace to describe terror attacks as ‘senseless’. The horrific Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka, which cost the lives of more than 350 people, several British citizens among them, make little sense. The only way to understand them is as a symptom of the growing globalisation of terror. The tactics — synchronised bombs on a Christian holy day — are grotesquely familiar. And it was not surprising to learn that one of the attackers was partly educated in London. The attacks, on three Catholic churches and three hotels favoured by westerners, clearly targeted Christians. The culprits have been identified as local Islamic extremists. The purpose of the

Saturday

Richard Walton

How the police should deal with far-right terrorism

As New Zealand comes to terms with the most deadly terrorist attack ever carried out on its soil, leaders from around the world will be asking their security advisors whether this marks the start of an escalation of right-wing threats and whether their current strategies for defeating this form of extremism are fit for purpose. It has been obvious for several years now that far-right extremism has been growing across western democracies with social media providing the means for a new global connectivity between far-right individuals and groups. In the past three years alone, the UK has experienced two terrorist attacks carried out by far-right extremists (the murder of Jo

Friday

Qanta Ahmed

My grief for the victims of the New Zealand mosque attack | 15 March 2019

‘We belong to Allah and to Allah we shall return’. Muslims around the world, including me, are now reciting the verse from the Quran that Muslims say on hearing of the death of a fellow believer. Taking in news of the murder of 49 worshippers at a mosque in sleepy, safe New Zealand at the hands of a white supremacist, this verse came to my lips again and again. I felt the same grief when I watched the attacks on 9/11 unfolding. In the days afterwards, I also struggled with the reaction of others in Riyadh, where I was living at the time, and their shameful sense of schadenfreude. This was hard to deal with

Qanta Ahmed Qanta Ahmed

My grief for the victims of the New Zealand mosque attack

‘We belong to Allah and to Allah we shall return’. Muslims around the world, including me, are now reciting the verse from the Quran that Muslims say on hearing of the death of a fellow believer. Taking in news of the murder of 49 worshippers at a mosque in sleepy, safe New Zealand at the hands of a white supremacist, this verse came to my lips again and again. I felt the same grief when I watched the attacks on 9/11 unfolding. In the days afterwards, I also struggled with the reaction of others in Riyadh, where I was living at the time, and their shameful sense of schadenfreude. This was hard to deal with

Friday

David Bergman

Bangladesh doesn’t want Shamima Begum. Here’s why it might have to take her

Whatever the arguments over the Government’s decision to revoke Isis bride Shamima Begum’s British citizenship, the teenager’s future now depends on one thing: will the courts determine she is a dual national who is eligible for Bangladeshi citizenship? If so, Sajid Javid’s decision is lawful, as this means that the loss of her British citizenship will not leave her stateless. But what does Bangladesh make of this row? The view from Dhaka has been clear: we don’t want her. In a statement issued this week, the country’s foreign ministry said: “The government of Bangladesh is deeply concerned that she has been erroneously identified as a holder of dual citizenship shared with

Thursday

Daniel DePetris

Isis’s collapse has sparked a new rift between Trump and Europe

The days of black-clad militants rampaging through cities, parading captives as war trophies and doing wheelies in U.S.-made Humvees are over. The Islamic State – which once presided over eight million people in a reign of terror across territory as large as the United Kingdom – is now confined to an orchard in the dusty Syrian village of Baghouz. The so-called caliphate is now just 700 square metres. Within days— certainly weeks —all of Isis’ territory will be retaken, the stragglers either killed in a barrage of US airstrikes or sent to Syrian Kurdish-run prison camps to the north. The demise of the caliphate, however, has given way to a

Wednesday

Brendan O’Neill

The shame of those siding with Shamima Begum | 20 February 2019

At last, having kept pretty shtum about it for the past few years, the virtue-signalling set has mustered up some sympathy for women caught up in the horrific Isis vortex.  Unfortunately, though, their sympathy isn’t for the Yazidi women who were burned alive after refusing to become sex slaves for Isis jihadists. Or the Kurdish women who found themselves living under the brutal misogynistic yoke of the Isis empire. Or the Syrian and Iraqi women whose husbands and sons were beheaded for adhering to the wrong branch of Islam. No, their sympathy is for a woman who supported the movement that did all those things. Who provided moral succour to