Security minister Dan Jarvis said ‘there was sufficient risk for the perpetrator to have been managed through Prevent’, adding: ‘There are serious questions about how various agencies failed to identify and collectively act on the warning signs.’ Southport MP Patrick Hurley said: ‘Some of the details in this report, in this review, beggar belief.’ Yesterday the damning insight of the case revealed how Rudakubana, now 18, had admitted carrying a knife at school more than ten times, talked about ‘getting teachers murdered’ and wanted to knife a boy he had attacked with a hockey stick to ‘finish him off’.
Which should, in a sane world, suffice to finish off the careers of the idiots in Prevent who handled his case. But won't, of course. They won't even be named.
Yet in a rush to close his case ‘prematurely’, experts may have failed to consider all the evidence because his name was misspelt in files, the report said. Prevent also did not complete lines of inquiries and concerns that he posed a risk to staff and students were brushed off as a ‘knee-jerk reaction’.
Misguided officers placed ‘too much focus’... ‘on the absence of a distinct ideology’, and missed signs of his escalating risk, the report concluded.
In short, they were incompetent at the very basics of their job. As is so often the case with those tasked with protecting us. Perhaps understandably so, as those who do a good job and do it well are often punished for it years later.
Yesterday Mr Jarvis announced that Rudakubana will be considered as a ‘registered terrorist offender’ after he was jailed last month for 52 years for the murders and for producing the poison ricin using a terrorist manual.
Finally, common sense breaks out!
Head of Counter-Terrorism Policing Matt Jukes said the Prevent system was ‘not equipped’ at the time to deal with ‘emerging risks that were very different to those it had been built to address’.
Or with good spelling and grammar, which would seem to be a good place to start. Who knows how many other threats are lurking in the database with different spellings preventing them from being collated?
