It shouldn’t take a tragedy to get jihadists off our streets Allison Pearson
It was one of those glittering frosty mornings in Cambridge on Monday, the kind of day that makes you glad to be alive. It only added to the terrible poignancy of the gathering in Market Square to mark the deaths of Jack Merritt, 25, and Saskia Jones, 23.
Some of my friends’ kids, who had known Jack socially (“he was popular, really lovely”), were there to lay flowers. The minute’s silence went on and on as if returning to the normal babble of life were intolerable. In a chilling irony, the two young criminologists had been murdered at a conference to mark five years of Learning Together, a programme for students and prisoners, by one of the very men who had benefited from Jack and Saskia’s shared passion for rehabilitation.
Usman Khan was let out of jail last December on licence after serving only eight years, because his sentence had been reduced (by Lord Leveson) on appeal. A crazy change in the law meant that the release was automatic. Khan didn’t need to appear before the parole board, although the judge at his original trial had been clear that this cunning fanatic should not be released if he posed a continuing danger to the public.
Now wearing an electronic tag, Khan was given permission to travel from his home in Staffordshire to the event at Fishmongers’ Hall, even though he was once part of a terrorist group that had planned to blow up the London Stock Exchange, and the beautiful livery hall lay right next to London Bridge, scene of a horrific attack in 2017.
Did alarm bells really not ring? I’m afraid not.
Usman Khan had become a bit of a poster boy for the well-meaning Cambridge academics. The 28-year-old’s bearded face appeared on their literature. There was even talk of the man who once plotted to set up an al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan becoming a student at the university. Jack Merritt, in particular, thought he had formed a bond with Khan and was delighted to play his part in reforming a jihadist. The Learning Together course co-ordinator, Jack had organised a 10km run to raise money to buy Khan a laptop.
Normally, the movements of such a serious ex-offender would be restricted. However, Khan had attended a previous LT conference where he behaved like a model British citizen (exactly as he had promised in a handwritten, contrition-by-numbers letter asking to attend a deradicalisation course). On that occasion, he had been escorted by police.
On Friday, he travelled alone to join a gathering that included students and convicted murderers out on licence. Astonishingly, there was no security at Fishmongers’ Hall. Perhaps Jack, Saskia and the other young idealists felt that guards would indicate a regrettable lack of trust in their rehabilitated guests?
If so, the decision revealed a dreadful naivety that was to cost two lives, leave several people badly injured, expose Londoners to grave danger and catapult the early release of terrorists bang into the centre of the general election campaign.
As Khan ran amok with two knives, slashing at his benefactors, did they realise the jihadist had played them like a Stradivarius?
One thing we do know is that it fell to two tough nuts, Lukasz Koczocik, a Polish kitchen porter, and James Ford, who murdered a girl with learning difficulties, to take on the terrorist in ferocious, whale tusk-to-blade combat. You can bet that neither of those brave men hold nice liberal views that would find favour in the Cambridge University Institute of Criminology. Thank God for that.
An eye for an eye, fight fire with fire extinguisher! Out onto the bridge they tumbled, allowing others to flee to safety while pursuing Khan whom, without the benefit of any higher education, they had correctly identified as “the bad guy”.
Maybe that’s the untold story of the world: the clever and the privileged are allowed their enlightened experiments so long as there are hardmen like Lukasz and Ford to protect us from the consequences of their wishful thinking.
I would never use “do-gooder” as a term of abuse. Doing good is a damn sight better than its opposite. Jack and Saskia weren’t wrong. Rehabilitation is a noble ideal. A charity I give to every Christmas helps find a job for people coming out of prison. Forgiveness is the greatest of all Christian tenets. But jihadists don’t do forgiveness.
On the train to London last Friday, do you suppose Usman Khan, already wearing his home-made suicide vest, ever thought about the pain he was about to inflict on Jack Merritt and the other marvellous people who had championed him? Of course not. One young man dedicated his life to helping “the underdog”. The other called kuffar (infidels) like Jack Merritt “dogs”.
Both were true believers in their cause. One had an excess of empathy; the other had none at all, which is to say he was evil. I realise that our criminal justice system doesn’t believe in evil, probably thinking it’s a bit ghastly and Right-wing, but Usman Khan was the devil incarnate in that bloodcurdling moment he turned on his guardian angels. Attempts to rehabilitate him were doomed.
Yesterday, Jack’s father, David Meritt, wrote a blistering piece in The Guardian saying Jack would be “livid” that his death was “being used to perpetuate an agenda of hate”. Jack, he said, wanted “a world where we do not lock up and throw away the key”.
Mr Merritt deserves our deepest sympathy. In his anguish, it is only proper that he should defend his son’s work. But, I’m sorry, but he does not have the right to dictate what measures can or cannot be used to protect other people’s children. My daughter and son work and study in London. I don’t want a “reformed” jihadist anywhere near them.
For I too am livid. I’m livid that a human rights lawyer boasts on his website that he got a reduced sentence for Usman Khan. I’m livid that public money paid for that lawyer to get the jihadist released early in order that he should be at liberty to kill members of, oh, look, the public! (Are we so soppy as a society that we now fund our own extermination?)
I’m livid that, for all the years Theresa May was home secretary, a Conservative government basically did sod all to tighten up Labour laws and sentencing guidelines which could, and should, have kept dangerous fanatics like Khan off our streets.
I am livid that, for far too long, the hate preacher Anjem Choudary was indulged as a cuddly Muslim spokesman when he was actually a hardcore Islamist poisoning young disciples like Usman Khan against this country. I’m livid that we have a justice system so woolly and wrongheaded that it treats jihadists like any other murderers, when it’s perfectly clear that they belong in the same secure facilities as the criminally insane. And should be detained indefinitely, as madmen are, particularly when they’ve learnt to pull the wool over the eyes of the authorities who claim they’ve been deradicalised.
Finally, I despair that it took another massacre at London Bridge to spur the Government into proper scrutiny of the 74 jihadists who have recently – in defiance of all common sense – been released back into society. Two have already returned to jail. One was shot dead. Only another 71 to go.
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