Islamic State Alive and Well in Europe
The Islamic State may have been “defeated” in the Middle East, it remains a potent danger to Europe.
Islamic State Alive and Well in Europe
Soeren Kern | Gatestone Institute | December 2, 2019
The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the November 29 jihadi attack at London Bridge, where a Pakistani Islamist stabbed two people to death and injured three others. The suspect, 28-year-old Usman Khan, a convicted terrorist, was subsequently shot dead by police.
Khan, from Stoke-on-Trent, was convicted in February 2012 of plotting — on behalf of al-Qaeda — jihadi attacks against the London Stock Exchange and pubs in Stoke, in addition to setting up a jihadi training camp in Pakistan. He was sentenced to an “indeterminate sentence,” meaning that he could have been kept in prison beyond his original minimum term of eight years due to the danger he posed to national security.
In April 2013, however, the Court of Appeal revised that sentence with a fixed term of eight years. Khan, a student of the Islamist extremist Anjem Choudary, who co-founded the now banned Al-Muhajiroun group, was released from prison in December 2018, before the end of his sentence, after agreeing to wear an electronic tag.
