Fourth UK terror attack in six months sparks questions for government

All five alleged attackers were released or serving prisoners but the government is increasing jail sentences, Lizzie Dearden writes

Flowers are laid close to the scene where three people were stabbed in Forbury Gardens in Reading (EPA)

The Reading stabbing is the fourth alleged terror attack launched in the UK in the six months since officials lowered the national terror threat level – posing serious questions for the government’s response.

Each one has been carried out by released or serving prisoners, but ministers are presenting longer jail sentences as a solution.

The suspect for Saturday’s attack, 25-year-old Khairi Saadallah, may still have been under probation supervision for unrelated offences when he allegedly murdered three victims as they sat with friends in a park.

Security agencies are investigating fellow inmates he met during a jail sentence served last year, and attempting to work out if he was radicalised.

A security analyst called the attack part of a “sadly predictable” pattern of similar killings that have come to dominate the threat picture in Britain.

Complex, networked plots like those behind the 2005 London bombings appear to have been replaced by “lone actor” atrocities using knives and vehicles.

Easier, faster and cheaper to launch, they are also harder for security services to detect without a trial of communications or traditionally suspicious behaviour patterns.

But in retrospect, warnings have been missed for the vast majority of attacks in recent years – potentially including Reading.

Mr Saadallah had come on to MI5’s radar for allegedly considering travel to wage jihad abroad in 2019.

The previous year, the head of UK counterterror policing warned that Isis supporters prevented from leaving for foreign battlegrounds may attack on home soil instead.

Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner Neil Basu said that before 2017’s attacks security services believed that fighters returning from abroad presented the biggest threat.

“It wasn’t – the threat was already here – and there are still plenty of aspirant or frustrated travellers who now have nowhere to go,” he added.

Raffaello Pantucci, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said histories of violence, crime and mental health issues have also been a common thread running through recent attacks.

“Unfortunately, completely managing such threats is almost impossible given their tendency to be volatile and often not on security services’ immediate radars,” he added.

“The random nature of their targeting and the low-tech weapons used render usual triggers irrelevant.”

The Reading suspect had recently served time for minor offences in prison – as had the terrorists behind the three terror attacks to hit the UK in the past six months.

One of the stabbings – at HMP Whitemoor in January – was allegedly carried out by an inmate serving a terror sentence and another convicted of violent offences who had no known history of extremism.

The government has excluded the incident from its response to the Fishmongers’ Hall and Streatham attacks, and attempted to present a push for longer terror sentences as a preventative measure.

Days ago, the justice secretary told MPs that the two attacks “clearly demonstrated the need for terror offenders to spend longer in prison”.

But the evidence suggests that terrorist monitoring and deradicalisation programmes in prison are not working, and that probation workers are failing to spot security threats when convicts are released.

The Reading stabbing may cause the government to urgently re-evaluate its assumptions.