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Six terrorists convicted of further terror act after release

New figures show that six convicted terrorists have been released from prison and convicted of a further terrorist offence within seven years.

Released to Lord Anderson, the former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, the data was revealed as Parliament begins debating emergency legislation designed to keep extremist prisoners in jail for longer. The government’s proposals will block the automatic release of about 50 serving terrorist prisoners at the halfway point of their sentences.

The written question to the government shows that 196 individuals convicted of a terrorist offence between January 2013 and December 2019 were released from prison in England and Wales with 3.06 per cent of them going on to be convicted of a further terrorist offence.

The reoffending figures do not include Streatham attacker Sudesh Amman, nor Usman Khan, the convicted terrorist who killed two people in London Bridge in November, as they were shot dead, nor does it include those whose terrorist criminality is yet to be detected.

Raffaello Pantucci​, a senior associate fellow at Rusi, said: “There is always the complicating factor of people being convicted on other charges, but even if you throw in some mitigating factors like that for the data, it does certainly suggest that just using sentence extension as an answer might not be dealing with the problem.

“These figures suggest that there are quite a few former terrorist offenders out there who have not gone back into terrorist activity, and we have not really been presented with the case that all of those who are currently inside are completely different to this previous cohort. There are clearly some very dangerous terrorist offenders sitting in the UK’s jails, and we need to find ways of managing them. But our response needs to be focused on them, and separate them out from those who pose less of a risk, rather than simply grouping them all together.”

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