A Clockwork Jihadi
“‘Oh, it will be nice to be good, sir.’ But I had a real horrorshow smeck at that inside, brothers”
— Alex in A Clockwork Orange
USMAN KHAN MAY WELL ENTER HISTORY as the jihadi who killed “de-radicalisation”. His murder of two Cambridge criminology graduates, Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones, near London Bridge in 2019 cast the loftiest aspiration of British counter-terrorism, the wish to change terrorists’ minds, as hubris.
Whereas talk of “de-radicalising” terrorists had begun in the wake of the 7/7 bomb attacks of 2005 — attacks led by a man who purported to punish Britain for “atrocities” he said it was committing against Muslims abroad — Usman Khan punished his victims for an ostensible virtue: their willingness to imagine his redemption. In so doing, he propagandised the dark heart of modern jihad — a conviction that unbelievers, whatever they might do, are subhuman and deserving of destruction.
The origins of the case date back to 2010, when Khan was arrested for his involvement in plots to establish a jihadi training camp in Pakistan and to bomb the London Stock Exchange. Sentenced in 2012 to indefinite detention to protect the public, and later identified as a “high risk” prisoner, he nevertheless won an appeal in 2013 that gave him a fixed term. While in prison, he took part in an official rehabilitative scheme called the Healthy Identity Intervention. After his release “on licence” in 2018, he participated in the Desistance and Disengagement Programme, which is the main component of rehabilitative hopes set out in the government’s counter-terrorism strategy, Contest.
While in prison, Khan also joined an idealistic Cambridge University-based criminology project called Learning Together, which was de-signed to bring students into contact with prisoners to confront the “stigma”, “marginalisation” and “prejudice” that convicts face. The programme had used Khan’s photo in its literature, along with news of a fundraising effort that had allowed it to buy him a laptop he needed. It had even published Khan’s thankyou letter, which parrots the programme’s soothing language.
The scene of Khan’s rampage was the
