“You’ll never be wasting our time,” reads the poster (above and below) featuring Matt Jukes (right), Head of the Counter Terrorism Police, the organisation responsible for the counter-extremism programme Prevent, standing next to a Manchester Arena survivor. Jukes has a stern look in his eyes, as if to warn would-be extremists that they can’t hide or evade justice from Britain’s toughest force.
Back in the real world, however, there are signs that all is not well with Prevent (to put it incredibly mildly). On Monday it was revealed that Axel Rudakubana, the Southport killer, had been referred to the programme three times between 2019 and 2021 due to his obsession with violence, but Prevent never heeded the warnings.
One of the referrals, according to the Daily Mail, “is thought to follow concerns about Rudakubana’s potential interest in the killing of children in a school massacre, but it was deemed that there was no counter terrorism risk”. As Rudakubana had no clear ideology, it appears Prevent didn’t quite know what to do with him – deciding that its counter-radicalisation scheme was unsuitable.
Details emerging this week show how inflexible Prevent is; that it couldn’t make sense of someone whose views and behaviours didn’t fit a neat mould, but we now know had downloaded an Al-Qaeda training manual and kept ricin, a poison, in his bedroom. No doubt the teachers who referred Rudakubana to the service three times felt they weren’t “wasting” Prevent’s time, only to receive the equivalent of “computer says no”.
Unfortunately Rudakubana’s case is part of a wider pattern in Prevent, where someone is referred multiple times, little to nothing happens and they go on to commit homicide – sometimes multiple times.
Another dreadful example of this was in 2020 when a Libyan asylum seeker, who’d been referred to Prevent four times, slaughtered three men in a Reading Park.
Since arriving in Britain in 2012, Khairi Saadallah was repeatedly arrested and convicted of offences such as theft and assault. While incarcerated he told prison staff he was part of Islamic State and wanted to “blow up” Britain. Why was he free to “execute”, as the authorities summarised it, these poor men? Where was Prevent? An inquest found the deaths were “probably avoidable”.
The year before, Usman Khan, another Prevent referral, stabbed five people, two fatally, at a learning conference in London Bridge. Khan “had a history of involvement in events of violence as a teenager”, including “acts preparatory to custody”, according to an inquest about the attack. Prevent kept an eye on him – preparing “general reports” about his status – but visits became “less regular” and “he became more socially isolated”.
On November 14th 2019, according to the inquest:
Two Prevent team officers visited Usman Khan at the suggestion of the MAPPA agencies to take photographs of his DVDs and video games. He became upset about this, which he apparently regarded as an invasion of privacy. This reaction provoked some concern on the part of investigating officers.
But not much seemed to happen between then and November 29th, when he travelled alone to the conference, armed with knives, and went on his killing spree.
Sir David Amess is yet another victim of those Prevent failed to stop. Ali Harbi Ali, who killed the Conservative MP, had “engaged” with the service between 2014 and 2015. Sir David’s daughter Katie Amess said that the authorities had “missed follow-up meetings” with Ali during this time, allowing him to “disappear out of the system.”
She told reporters: “Had we done the proper monitoring through this Prevent scheme, we could have stopped this. And it’s not just failed my family, it’s failing other members of the public and it’s failing other members of Parliament.”
In response the Home Office said that the Prevent system is a “vital tool to stop people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism”, but it appears to be anything but.
Moreover, the Conservative Government and now this one have completely ignored an independent review of Prevent, written by Sir William Shawcross, whose recommendations may, had they been implemented, prevented more loss of life.
It contained damning conclusions about the service, including that it had funded a group whose head was sympathetic to the Taliban, and that it had been trying to equalise the threat of Islamist extremism with the far Right – despite the former posing a much larger threat.
Shawcross added that Prevent had been consistently unable to determine how many community organisations receiving some of Prevent’s £49 million budget were having any impact.
Following the atrocities committed by Rudakubana, it’s time we called out the service that fails to prevent.
For more of Charlotte’s articles on Prevent and border issues, head to her Substack section ‘Bordering on Insane‘.
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