https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/shouldnt-take-tragedy-get-jihadis-streets/
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.