Top police chief calls for new anti-terror measures

The UK’s top police officer has said that British citizens who travel abroad with an eye to becoming terrorists should be stripped of their passports.

Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the chief of the Metropolitan Police, was responding to reports of Britons travelling abroad to wage war in Syria and Iraq as part of the terrorist group Isis.

In a radio interview, he opined that “it’s a privilege to have a passport and be a citizen of this country”, stating that those who chose to travel abroad for terroristic purposes had “made a choice” about where their loyalties lay.

“Certainly for us anything that either stops them from going or preferably stops them from coming back is a good idea,” he commented.

The police chief also backed Boris Johnson’s call for the presumption of innocence to be rescinded for British citizens who choose to travel to current warzones.

The Mayor of London said on Monday that he wanted a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ approach taken in these cases, with Britons who visit Syria and Iraq being assumed to be terrorists unless they can produce evidence otherwise.

Sir Bernard echoed his comments, saying: “If we can get an assumption that when people come back and have been to Syria they've been involved in terrorism. If they can prove they haven't then that's up to them. It's pretty hard for us sometimes to prove what they were doing in Syria.”

He also called for the reintroduction of “something like” the control order, a previous form of anti-terror measure which has now been scrapped.

“Control orders were here before,” he said, “they were stopped because the threat was reduced and quite properly it was seen as too intrusive to have that sort of control order. I think these things have got to be considered when the drumbeat changes and it's clear the drumbeat changed.”