London terrorist had 'fierce' fascination with extremism and violence
04 February, 2020
London terrorist Sudesh Amman encouraged his girlfriend to behead her own parents in a sign of the extremism he nurtured for years before he stabbed three people on the streets of London.
Amman had a desperate ambition to “purge society” and an obsession with knives, a court heard in 2018 as he was jailed for three years and four months for possessing extremist documents, including a bomb-making manual.
The student, 20, embarked on his knife attack days after his mandatory release from prison last month after having served only half of his sentence.
But researchers who highlighted his coming release from prison had expressed concerns that he “ticked every box” indicating he could launch further attacks on his release.
He was young and apparently unrepentant, having smiled when he was jailed, and had sought to disguise his activities through encrypted communication network Telegram.
Amman was caught in 2018 after a Dutch anti-extremism blogger posted one of his messages from a Telegram chat group that showed a knife and two guns, with the caption “armed and ready April 3” overlaid in Arabic.
He was arrested within 24 hours. Police seized a stash of weapons and extremist material at the home he shared with his mother and five brothers.
The seized items “demonstrated the worrying extent of his terrorist mindset”, police said.
They found almost 350,000 files on his devices, including manuals such as US Army Knife Manual Techniques and Bloody Brazilian Knife Fighting.
They also discovered that he shared four links to videos showing graphic ISIS violence.
He shared graphic images on a WhatsApp group with siblings as young as 11 and said: “Radicalising is not wasting time”.
Police said “a number of vulnerable people” connected to Amman had received counter-radicalisation counselling after his arrest.
Officers found a notebook at his home that demonstrated his fascination with dying in the name of terrorism.
“We were able to show the court that Amman had a fierce interest in violence and martyrdom,” said Alexis Boon, head of London’s counter-terrorist command, in 2018.
Amman was one of about 180 convicted extremists to be released early from jail in the past two decades, analysis from the Henry Jackson Society, a think tank in London, showed.
It highlighted his coming release with two other prisoners this month, as he appeared to be a high-risk case despite receiving a fairly short sentence.
The group’s concern appeared to be shared by officials as he was under surveillance by undercover police, an expensive operation that would only be used for a few suspects, spokesman Samuel Armstrong said.
Amman's rapid path from release to terrorist attack has raised further questions about the quality of de-radicalisation programmes in jails.
Ian Acheson, a former prison governor who carried out a review of extremism in prisons for the UK government, told the BBC that the death of Amman, who was shot by police during his knife attack, was the “dismal end of a clearly broken risk management and intervention process that starts off in prison custody”.
“I’m still profoundly unconvinced that the prison service has the appetite and the aptitude to assertively manage terrorist offenders from the first day they are in custody to the last day they are on community supervision," Mr Acheson said.
Source: www.thenational.ae
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