How to rehabilitate a terrorist
Usman Khan, the London Bridge attacker, had been convicted before. Can jihadists be reformed?
WHEN A MAN ran amok with two knives on November 29th, many Londoners followed official advice to “run, hide and tell”. But a few brave souls chased Usman Khan onto London Bridge, armed with a fire extinguisher and, of all things, a narwhal tusk, plucked from a display. The attacker took two lives before he was shot dead by police. The editors of Britain’s tough-on-crime newspapers—three of whom could watch events from their corner offices across the bridge—didn’t know what to make of it. Not all of the terrorist’s pursuers made for an easy moral. “One hero was a jailed murderer on day release,” the Daily Mail acknowledged.
This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “After the fall”
Britain December 7th 2019
- “Get Brexit done”? It’s not as simple as Boris Johnson claims
- What would happen in a hung parliament?
- How to rehabilitate a terrorist
- The Tories are well ahead in Wrexham, part of Labour’s “Red Wall”
- The best quotes from the final full week of Britain’s election
- The Tories are down but not out in London
- It’s lonely being a Tory candidate in deep-red Liverpool
- Truth has been the first casualty of Britain’s election
From the December 7th 2019 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
Explore the editionDiscover more
British MPs vote in favour of assisted dying
A monumental social reform is closer to being realised
The slow death of a Labour buzzword
And what that says about Britain’s place in the world
Britain’s Supreme Court considers what a woman is
At last. Britons had been wondering what those 34m people who are not men might be
Can potholes fuel populism?
A new paper looks at one explanation for the rise of Reform UK
Are British voters as clueless as Labour’s intelligentsia thinks?
How the idea of false consciousness conquered the governing party