Police said on Monday they had arrested a man for breaching reporting requirements under anti-terror legislation as UK authorities continued an urgent review of convicted terror offenders following Friday’s London Bridge attack.
In a statement the Metropolitan Police said it had arrested a 23-year-old man in north London on suspicion of breaching notification requirements on Sunday.
Although the Met said it was not linked to the attack carried out by Usman Khan, who killed two people in a knife attack on Friday, the move came hours after police in the West Midlands recalled a convicted jihadi to prison as a result of the review.
An official identified the man arrested by West Midlands police as Nazam Hussein, who was convicted alongside Khan in 2012 of a plot to plant a bomb at the London Stock Exchange. He was arrested on the suspicion of preparation of terrorist acts, a suspected breach of his licence conditions.
The Ministry of Justice announced the review into the licence conditions for some 74 terrorist offenders who have been released from prison over the weekend.
The justice secretary Robert Buckland told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday that the review was more than a paper exercise and that the National Probation Service — the government-run service that monitors high-risk offenders in England and Wales — would be meeting all of them this week.
“It’s not just a paper exercise — it’s a real-life exercise,” he said.
Both sentencing policy towards terrorist prisoners and the resourcing of probation and other services charged with monitoring them became big political issues over the weekend following the attack at Fishmongers’ Hall in central London.
Mr Buckland insisted spending cuts played no role in the oversight failures of Khan.
“There has never been a question that resources were an issue in this type of case,” Mr Buckland said.
The attack killed Jack Merritt, 25, and Saskia Jones, 23. Both were attending an event organised by Learning Together, a project based at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology aimed at aiding prisoners’ rehabilitation through providing them with higher education. Police shot Khan dead at the scene after members of the public wrestled him to the ground on London Bridge.
Later on Monday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn attended a vigil for the victims outside the Guildhall in the City of London, a few hundred metres from where the horrors of Friday’s attack unfolded.
The opposition Labour party has pointed out that probation and other criminal justice services have suffered especially deep cutbacks amid the government’s public spending reductions over the past decade.
Mr Buckland insisted services handling Khan and other released jihadis had not been affected, in line with the Conservatives’ long-term insistence that counterterror operations’ funding has been protected from cuts.
Earlier, Nick Hardwick, the former head of the parole board, told the BBC that cuts and reorganisation in the system had affected the organisations’ ability to keep people safe.
Mr Buckland also defended the government from an attack by David Merritt, Jack Merritt’s father, who said he did not want his son’s death to be used as a “pretext for more draconian sentences or for detaining people unnecessarily”. Jack Merritt worked as a co-ordinator for the Learning Together project.
“I think we have to be realistic about what is mercifully a small group indeed because public protection and the need to ensure we are safe has to be the number one priority,” Mr Buckland said.
