How Usman Khan slipped through the net

Five years ago, convicted terrorist Usman Khan murdered two young people at an event hosted by the prisoner-rehabilitation scheme, Learning Together, at London Bridge.

Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt were both involved in running Learning Together, which was part of the University of Cambridge. They were stabbed to death on 29 November 2019 by the 28-year-old Khan, who was supposedly on community supervision nearly a year after being released from HMP Whitemoor.

Khan had taken part in previous publicity for Learning Together, which showcased him as a reformed character, moving on from his terrorist lifestyle. He had been sentenced to prison indefinitely in 2012 for planning a terrorist bomb attack on the London Stock exchange with a group of nine extremists. Prior to this sentence, Khan had written to the trial judge stating he had repented his views. The judge, in his summing up, said, ‘That is welcome, but the sincerity or long-term nature of that stated contrition is more relevant for those who will have to manage their sentences than for me in passing them’. Khan received a heavy sentence because of his ‘long-term’ and ‘serious’ commitment to terrorism by additionally planning for a terrorist training camp in Kashmir using land belonging to his parents.

Khan spent much of his sentence in HMP Whitemoor – a notorious high-security prison, home to around 500 of the UK’s most dangerous prisoners, including dozens of other terrorist offenders and murderous psychopaths. Behind the bars of this prison, postcode and ethnic-identity gangs vie for control. Serious organised crime and ideological extremism mix together, creating lethal possibilities for dangerous new allegiances. It is an extraordinarily difficult place to manage at the best of times.

At some point during his detention, he came to the attention of Learning Together and was invited to become one of its students. The idea behind this initiative was that long-term prisoners and students from Cambridge University would connect at the prison and sit alongside each other in what the website called ‘inclusive and transformative learning communities’. The areas of study included criminology, philosophy and theology. Staff at HMP Whitemoor told local media that Jack Merritt, one of Khan’s victims and a case worker for Learning Together, knew his killer and that this ‘was definitely a targeted attack’.

Khan, released from prison on licence at the time of his attack, had been given permission to travel to the conference hosted in Fishmongers’ Hall in London. The litany of organisational failures and missed opportunities that resulted in the fatal converging of terrorists and those who were trying to reform them is something that was painfully exposed in front of the anguished parents at the inquest into the deaths of Saskia and Jack. The failings, forensically exposed by counsel for the families, extended throughout the time Khan was in custody.

The prison service very rarely releases prisoners directly into the community from high-security prisons at the end of their custodial sentence, as appears to have been the case with Khan. Normally, high-risk prisoners progress through the system over several years in decreasing levels of security and control until they can be tested in open conditions in a low-security ‘category D’ jail prior to release. In most cases with offending of such magnitude, decisions on if and how to release terrorist prisoners are made by the parole board, the independent statutory body that grants and licenses prisoner release for serious or dangerous offenders. However, Khan had successfully appealed against his indeterminate sentence and had his sentence converted to 16 years in prison. He was released automatically at the halfway point, spending 11 months in the community, notionally under the supervision of the probation service as well as a Home Office scheme for released terrorists, known as the Disengagement and Desistance programme.

Even after the inquest it is still unclear why Khan did not take the route of most serious offenders by being placed in progressively lower-security category prisons, rather than being immediately released. It’s reasonable to infer that because this did not happen, he was still judged to be a high risk within the prison system and in need of the most secure confinement right up to the point where he had to be released. This ought to have had profound implications for his risk management in the community. But as we now know, it did not.

There are conflicting reports about whether and how Khan engaged with efforts to address his toxic ideology in the eight years he was in custody. We do know that he participated in the Healthy Identity Intervention (HII) programme – a scheme developed to disengage prisoners from extremist offending.

Khan spent up to eight months in the community on release prior to his attack. It is plainly possible that other environmental factors not associated with his imprisonment conspired during that time to push him back over the edge and mobilise his previous, murderous intent.

However, five years on, we cannot ignore the theatre of his rage – an event meant to celebrate an experimental prison rehabilitation programme of which he was seen as a successful graduate. And there he targeted one of those who befriended and helped him. You cannot imagine a more calculated, callous and brutal rejection of the civilised values that Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones represented.

Whatever Usman Khan became, his trajectory saw him pass numerous public-protection agencies without being detected or deflected from ideologically motivated murder. The security service, police service, prison and probation service and Home Office were joined by multi-agency protection arrangements following his release. And yet this alphabet soup of agencies failed to spot Khan’s descent into jihad. How was this possible?

In the summer of 2016, the then justice secretary, Michael Gove, asked me to lead an assessment of Islamist extremism in the England and Wales prisons, probation and youth-justice system. I hastily assembled a small team of experts and began the evidence-gathering process. We visited dozens of prisons in Great Britain, Northern Ireland and several in Europe holding the continent’s most dangerous terrorists. Our growing concerns about the deficiencies we saw in the service’s capability to manage the terrorist threat was corroborated by what over 1,000 frontline staff told us in person and in surveys. I was so shocked at what we saw that my original draft report had to be toned down in language.

I saw the deficiencies in action during a visit to another high-security prison, HMP Woodhill, in late 2015. Observing prisoners being searched coming on to an exercise yard, I noticed that a prisoner dressed in clothing associated with the Muslim faith – a kufi hat and a long, flowing garment called a thobe – had not been searched. When I asked why this was, I was told by the supervising officer that prison staff could not search prisoners dressed in ‘religious clothing’ – despite no such prohibition existing and the fact the style of dress worn was a cultural choice rather than an Islamic mandate. There was no suggestion that the prisoner concerned was a security risk, but here was a clear example of a desire not to offend overriding operational security.

Staff at other prisons said that this was not an isolated aberration. I was told that had a member of staff attempted to search the individual concerned, a crowd would quickly have formed and subjected the officer to, at the very least, verbal intimidation. They would perhaps have received a complaint of racism. Frontline staff largely doubted the will of their senior managers to back them in these situations, and because the service is uniquely sensitive, perhaps obsessively so, to the charge of racism, it is not surprising that staff take the path of least resistance.

We observed, too, that prison imams lacked the tools, and sometimes the will, to combat Islamist ideology. I met some brave and committed imams working inside the chaplaincies of high-security prisons. The majority, however, were completely unaware that they had any legal duty, aside any moral imperative, to stop Muslim prisoners being drawn into violent extremism. Prison chaplaincies were replete with freely available literature, much of it sent from Saudi Arabia, that advocated extreme beliefs and was often sectarian, misogynistic and homophobic. Such writing had no place in prison chaplaincies for dangerous, alienated people in search of purpose and meaning.

The prison service’s intelligence-gathering system was hopelessly fractured and ineffectual. When it came to collating information on the presence of violent extremism, prisons were effectively on their own. There was no corporate understanding of the nature or extent of radicalisation, because data either wasn’t there, wasn’t looked for or wasn’t analysed. The extremism unit that did exist at the time was more focussed on servicing ministers’ briefing needs than real-time support and response to the front line.

It would be reassuring to think that this problem has been solved. Yet in 2020, writing for a Policy Exchange report on institutional weaknesses in the criminal-justice system, Lord Carlile, a former reviewer of the UK’s terror legislation, said ‘that information sharing between the National Counter Terrorism Police Network / MI5 and HMPPS and the MoJ has been routinely problematic… with a culture within the MoJ of not fully embracing the sharing of intelligence’.

One of the causes of this ‘entrenched’ problem is the fact the upper echelons of the prison service have long divested themselves of the idea it is a law-enforcement agency. Not only is the prison service hamstrung by a lack of technical capability, it is equally hobbled by a corporate culture that sees security as an irritatingly necessary brake on its mission to rehabilitate.

It has been helped in this delusion by a ‘closed loop’ of prisoner advocates and progressive ‘decarcerators’ who see prison as intrinsically bad – and sometimes by extension those who work in them – and who have done much in their doctrinaire obsessions to prevent prisons from getting better. Prison officials frequently seem more concerned with fashionable political sensibilities than the actual effectiveness of prisons. I found a perverse combination of arrogance and incompetence across the corporate management of the service.

Take, for example, the key deradicalisation programme in the prison service’s armoury, which Khan himself participated in – the Healthy Identity Intervention (HII). This programme, developed in 2010, was the first attempt by the prison service to facilitate ‘desistance and disengagement’ from extremist offending ‘regardless of a person’s particular ideological background’, via a series of one-on-one sessions with psychologists. Prisoners who had been on the course told us it was laughably easy to ‘game’ by telling the therapists what they wanted to hear.

HII emerged from research the prison service started in 2008, which showed that belonging and identity were powerful motivators for violent extremism. Extremists were formed as a new dominant ideology took hold in place of an existing worldview with all the usual in-built psychological constraints eroded. This is essentially a desensitising process to norms of behaviour that allowed, for example, the Manchester Arena bomber, Salman Abedi, to blow himself up and murder children and young people all around him in 2017. This research created a standard assessment model – known as ERG 22+ – used to assess and quantify the risk posed by extremists. It is still used today.

There has been little in the way of independent external validation of this process. The assessment tool was built from research on the cohort of extremist prisoners from 2008 to 2011, who were markedly different from the extremist population of today. For example, in 2010, prisoners convicted of a far-right terror offence were virtually non-existent. By 2020, they were the fastest-growing cohort. There are now roughly a third more extreme right-wing terrorist offenders in custody than there were in 2010.

Moreover, official documents at the time the strategy was being developed refer to the majority of Muslim prisoners as being inspired by al-Qaeda extremism – such as those who carried out or enabled the 7/7 attacks in 2005 in London. This is markedly different in character to later ISIS terrorism. Whereas, crudely, al-Qaeda’s mission was to drive foreign crusaders and their apologists from ‘occupied’ lands in Saudi Arabia, Iraq etc, ISIS is committed to a revolutionary, transnational state-building exercise, mobilising Muslims everywhere and inspiring them to use whatever means they have to kill the infidel. These new-generation extremists, some of them captured as lone attackers, but many more as conspirators in failed mass-murder plots, entered an overcrowded prison system denuded of staff with an already entrenched and unopposed culture of opposition, driving fearful prisoners into gangs both criminal and religious in search of protection.

So it’s quite possible that the ERG 22+ assessment model and HII, the intervention it spawned, is now out of date. A study published by the Home Office on the reliability of the guidelines in 2019 rated the performance of ERG 22+ as ‘poor’ in the crucial risk area of ‘intent’. This certainly chimes with the expanding number of examples of prisoners, from Sudesh Amman to Khairi Saadallah to Usman Khan himself, being able to disguise their murderous intent while taking part in programmes like HII, before going on to commit atrocities after release. When we spoke to former terrorist prisoners after their release at a programme in east London, they laughed at how easy it was to game the programme by pretending to participate in order to gain some advantage for their release afterwards or additional privileges in prison.

We also need more sophisticated theological interventions. Islamist extremism is a religiously derived ideology that gives its adherents theological permission to kill and an eternal reward for the killer. Programmes like HII, however, are secular. They are psychosocial solutions to a theological deformity undertaken by people with completely different cultural reference points to their subjects. They are hamstrung from the start. These prisoners exist in a moral universe away from the well-meaning but eminently unskilled practitioners who deliver the deradicalisation programmes. I recall meeting the probation officer at HMP Frankland who was delivering the HII to one of the two terrorists who murdered Fusilier Lee Rigby in May 2013. She was an incredibly brave woman who attempted the HII process with him but said that he rejected further involvement once the questions became challenging and did not allow him to grandstand. This narcissism is another common feature among our convicted terrorists.

Some things have changed for the better since Usman Khan’s murderous rampage five years ago. He was able to take advantage of automatic early release to commit his crimes and the government acted quickly in the face of gathering public outrage to pass emergency legislation in February 2020 to close this loophole. The Counterterrorism and Sentencing Act 2021 then delivered swingeing changes to the sentencing, risk assessment and supervision of this country’s violent extremists.

As of 2021, the most serious terrorist offenders now serve a minimum of 14 years in custody and up to 25 years on licence – over three times the previous maximum for community supervision of high-risk prisoners. This matters. People must have confidence that the criminal justice system is on their side. If someone attacks them in the name of a religious or political belief, they must believe the state will seek to incapacitate that person for a very long time. Moreover, most of the evidence we have on these types of offenders suggests that long-term support and supervision after release will be required to help those who wish to recant hateful ideologies. Other new provisions now mean that those who cannot or will not surrender extremely hateful and dangerous beliefs can effectively be detained indefinitely.

But the best way to stop tomorrow’s violent extremists is to prevent them from getting on that dismal conveyor belt to martyrdom in the first place. A truly effective prevention strategy requires a ‘whole of society’ approach, which must bring communities that harbour terrorists to the fore. The current strategy is too focussed on intervention with individuals. We also need to ask and answer difficult questions about how the institutions and structures that socialise and civilise people in this country are failing to prevent the emergence of alienated and disaffected youngsters with an appetite to kill for their beliefs.

When terrorists are released from prison, they clearly need to begin their reintegration into society in fully secure facilities. The current approach has been to expand places in probation hostels and approved premises, which has clearly not been sufficient. Recently released terrorists need to be debriefed and monitored by police and psychiatrists as opposed to overworked probation officers.

Crucially, the imposition of more severe jail terms for terrorist acts, welcome as they are, will not on its own keep us safe if we don’t do something to break the hold of the extremist mindset while such offenders are detained. It’s no good boasting about the (doubtful) abilities of our harried and battered prison service to spot dangerous extremism when it patently has neither the capability nor, often, the corporate stomach to respond to it with actions that protect the public and their own staff.

I’m not convinced that extra time in custody alone would have changed the homicidal determination of London Bridge attacker Usman Khan one jot. His participation in the HII programme certainly didn’t. We must assertively engage and challenge violent extremists from day one in custody, where we have the best chance of reducing their dangerousness and supporting a better identity to emerge. We must tailor the response to the individual offenders’ extremist pathology, including theological deformities; not ‘sheep dip’ generic solutions.

After all, national security doesn’t stop at the prison gates. There are British citizens behind those high walls as well – prisoners and staff – who need to be protected from terrorists who might regard them as an easy target for retribution against extended sentences.

Indeed, just weeks after the London Bridge attack, two prisoners at HMP Whitemoor attempted to murder a prison officer while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’. After convicting them of attempted murder, the trial judge was clear that there was a terrorist motivation inspired by Islamist ideology.

This was no aberration. In January 2022, we learned about an assault, eight months earlier, on two prison officers by three convicted terrorists at HMP Belmarsh. Authorities say that it did not have a terrorist component but one prison officer was hospitalised after he was confronted and attacked by Salman Abedi’s brother Hasham, who had been handed a record-beating 55-year sentence for his part in the Manchester Arena bombing, Ahmed Hassan, the Parsons Green Tube bomber, and another prisoner on remand for terrorist crimes.

Without a dramatic change in how we manage and deal with risk, the vulnerability of prison staff to terrorists, given their close proximity and lack of protection, will very likely lead to a fatal attack in the future. Terrorists understand how the stakes are and many of the new generation of IS-inspired lone actors are facing a life behind bars or very substantial sentences that will leave them with little to lose in the way of retribution and much to gain in terms of status and propaganda.

Violent extremism has the power to disfigure society and rob people of their personal security. We can address this problem but only if we equip our prisons to be places with the time, space and tools to challenge the scourge of ideologically motivated offending. And, of course, only if the supply of new recruits is stopped at source. The quality of time spent in custody is as important, if not more important, than the quantity, especially in a prison system disfigured by multiple ‘everyday’ problems like violence, suicide, squalor, overcrowding, insufficient staff, indolence and rampant drug misuse.

The deprivation of liberty is the strongest power we have to punish the wicked and protect the vulnerable. We must use it wisely.

Ian Acheson is a former prison governor. He was also director of community safety at the Home Office.

The above is an edited extract from Ian’s book, Screwed: Britain’s Prison Crisis and How To Escape It, published by Biteback Publishing. Order it here.

Main picture by: West Midlands Police.

In-article pictures by: Getty