What happened
Usman Khan was a British Islamist extremist who had been convicted in 2012 for his role in a terrorist plot. The plot involved plans to bomb the London Stock Exchange and establish a terrorist training camp in Pakistan. He was sentenced to an indeterminate sentence for public protection, with a minimum term of eight years.
He was released from prison in December 2018, after serving roughly eight years. At that point he was subject to a number of restrictions and was being monitored by the authorities.
While in prison, Khan participated in a university-linked educational program called Learning Together, which was founded by Cambridge criminologist Dr. Amy Ludlow and colleagues. The program brought university students and prisoners together for educational courses.
Khan subsequently attended an event at Fishmongers' Hall in London on November 29, 2019, organized by Learning Together to celebrate participants who had completed courses.
He then carried out a terrorist attack.
Khan attacked people with knives on London Bridge, killing Jack Merritt, 25, and Saskia Jones, 23, both of whom had been involved with Learning Together. Several others were injured.
Police eventually shot and killed Khan.
The particularly troubling part
The criticism isn't simply that "a terrorist was released from prison and then committed another terrorist attack." The more interesting question is why he was regarded as sufficiently rehabilitated to participate in an event like this.
Khan had an unusually serious extremist history.
His 2012 conviction concerned a conspiracy involving:
- terrorist training;
- plans to establish a training facility in Pakistan;
- plans to raise money for terrorism;
- discussion of attacks in Britain, including the London Stock Exchange;
- and connections to extremist networks.
This wasn't someone whose original offense was marginal or whose radicalism was principally a matter of youthful rhetoric.
And there were warning signs after his release. Among other things, Khan was still regarded by authorities as sufficiently dangerous that he was subject to licence conditions and monitoring.
Was Cambridge calling him a "rehabilitation success"?
This needs some qualification.
The University of Cambridge did not itself officially declare Khan a rehabilitation success in the sense of certifying that he was no longer dangerous.
The Learning Together program, however, was explicitly built around the idea that education, dialogue and relationships between prisoners and university students could contribute to rehabilitation and reduce reoffending.
Khan had apparently been regarded as someone who had made progress through the program. And the 2019 event was explicitly celebrating rehabilitation and educational achievement.
That creates the uncomfortable irony: two people associated with the rehabilitation program were murdered by the very man whose participation was part of the program's success story.
And there was an even bigger institutional failure
The most important failure arguably wasn't Cambridge's.
It was the decision to release Khan under the terms of the law then in force.
Khan had originally received an indeterminate sentence for public protection. The Parole Board did not order his release; under the law applicable to him, he was released automatically once he had served his tariff period.
After the attack, the government commissioned an independent review by Jonathan Hall KC, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation.
The review found serious problems with the way terrorist prisoners were assessed and managed after release. The attack helped lead to changes in the law governing terrorist offenders and their release.
So I'd separate three propositions
1. "Usman Khan was a high-risk Islamist extremist."
Yes. That is straightforwardly supported by his history.
2. "The rehabilitation system substantially overestimated his rehabilitation."
Yes. The London Bridge attack provides extraordinarily strong evidence that whatever behavioral progress had occurred did not amount to abandonment of his extremist ideology or elimination of his capacity for terrorist violence.
3. "Cambridge and its liberal progressives caused the attack."
That's much harder to establish.
Cambridge's Learning Together program was not responsible for releasing Khan, and there is no good basis for saying that the program caused him to become violent. The much more defensible criticism is that the rehabilitation philosophy displayed excessive confidence in the ability of educational engagement to demonstrate genuine deradicalization, particularly when dealing with someone with Khan's history.
And there's a particularly sobering lesson here:
Being articulate, cooperative, educated, engaged in discussion, and apparently remorseful isn't the same thing as having abandoned an extremist ideology.
That's a very important distinction in assessing rehabilitation of terrorists.
