A convicted Al Qaeda captain could be released from detention in a psychiatric hospital within days without being formally risk assessed, it has been reported.
Haroon Aswat, from Batley, West Yorkshire, was jailed in the US for 20 years in 2015 for plotting to set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon.
He only had to serve seven years because of time spent at a psychiatric detention unit in the UK where he was taken after being arrested in Zambia in 2005 in the wake of the July 7 bombings in London.
In 2022, he was deported to the UK and detained under the Mental Health Act, and has been held since at South London’s Bethlem Royal Hospital.
According to The Sun, a ‘legal loophole’ related to risk checks means the 50-year-old could walk free as soon as next week.
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A court hearing in April heard his release was ‘expected in the relatively near future’.
It was held to approve a notification order which meant authorities must be provided updates on his post-release whereabouts, such as his address.
The Sun also reported that US court documents disclosed a confession by Haswat that he was a ‘mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks and a 2005 terrorist attack in the UK’.
It’s not clear how the alleged confession was made or whether it led to any further investigation.
Haroon was previously linked to the 7/7 bombings, although he was never convicted of playing a role in it.
Police sources initially told newspapers that two of the suspected bombers had received around 20 calls from a mobile phone linked to Aswat.
But they were not sure if the calls were made by ‘the man himself’.
Detectives investigating the 7/7 bombings traced 20 calls by the perpetrators to a phone linked to Aswat before the attack, but Aswat was never convicted of playing a role in it.
A 2022 report by a psychiatrist found there ‘remains the risk of Islamic violent extremism’ by Aswat.
UK law means a formal terror risk assessment cannot be carried out while an individual is being detained in this way.
The judge presiding over the April hearing said at the time: ‘Although (the psychiatrist) did not conduct a full risk assessment for terrorist risk, he identified 15 of the 22 relevant factors … as being likely to be present.
‘No formal terrorist risk assessment has been carried out in the United Kingdom since the defendant’s return here. The circumstances of his detention have precluded that.
‘However, on the basis of the material which is available, the defendant has been assessed by various police officers … that he remains a risk to national security.’
He said that the psychiatrist had concluded: ‘there remains the risk of Islamic violent extremism-motivated targeted terrorist offending behaviour given his threats to kill Jews, Christians and certain groups of Muslims … (t)here is also a risk of him influencing other vulnerable individuals, as when he is in an abnormal mental state his religious extremist rhetoric is amplified by mental illness’.
Aswat, who is now 50, helped to set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon and Seattle in the US in 1999.
The US government described it as a camp ‘to train young impressionable men in America to fight and kill so that they could travel to Afghanistan to join forces with Al Qaeda’.
He then travelled to Afghanistan to receive training from Al Qaeda in 2001, and did not appear on the radar of Western authorities until his 2005 arrest in Zambia.
In March 2015, he pleaded guilty in the US to one count of conspiracy to provide support to a foreign terrorist organisation before January 1, 2000, and to another charge related to providing material to a terrorist organisation.
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