Blame game escalates after London Bridge attack over why parts of report on monitoring were ignored

Killer Usman Khan slipped between two systems during a changeover, it is claimed
West Midlands Police/PA Wire
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A political blame game escalated today over the London terror attack.

Former home secretary David Blunkett said killer Usman Khan had slipped between two systems during a changeover and added: “No wonder people are bewildered.”

Fingers were being pointed at Cabinet minister Liz Truss who was accused of watering down recommendations made by an independent reviewer of the way terrorists are monitored after being released from prison.

Ms Truss took over from Michael Gove as justice secretary in 2016, shortly after he had accepted all but one of 69 recommendations for improvements made by Ian Acheson, a counter-terror specialist asked to examine the system.

Liz Truss has come under fire after the London Bridge attack
Reuters

In the official response, eight out of 11 major recommendations were accepted, with risk-management issues among those excluded.

Mr Blunkett, on Talk Radio, said it was “crazy, crazy politics” that Ms Truss rejected so much of a report that her colleague had agreed with, adding: “Why did one minister think it was right to implement virtually all of Ian’s proposals and another thought I’m not going to do that?"

David Blunkett pointed the finger at Liz Truss
Getty Images

A source close to Ms Truss said: “The majority of recommendations were accepted and Ms Truss ensured that the crucial measures were instituted.

“It was under her that specialist isolation units for terrorists were introduced to prevent inmates from peddling poisonous ideology across the mainstream prison population.

London Bridge terror attack | 29 November 2019

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Nick Hardwick, the former chairman of the Parole Board, said it was too soon to “jump to conclusions” about how Khan slipped through the net. “It does not seem to me that the perpetrator was giving obvious signs that he was a risk,” he told Today.

Jeremy Corbyn today said convicted terrorists should be released from prison only after completing a “significant proportion” of their jail sentences and having been rehabilitated so they present no threat.

“There are questions to be learned from this and they are, what happened in the prison with this particular individual, what assessment was made of his psychological condition before he was released and also what supervision and monitoring was he under after coming out?” he added.

But Mr Corbyn came under fire from the Labour candidate for the Southwark area, Neil Coyle, over his past opposition to measures against overseas terror states.

“It is a fallacy for anyone, including Corbyn, to claim this was ‘set off’ by the Iraq War,” said Mr Coyle writing for today’s Standard.

“This erroneous hypothesis ignored that 9/11 was two years before Iraq and that Paris has suffered multiple atrocities, despite France opposing the Iraq War.”

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