UK-based Islamist Anjem Choudary is set for release after serving half of his sentence.
Choudary was arrested in 2016 after being linked to 15 terror plots dating back over 20 years as well as encouraging Muslims to join ISIS, and to this day is “genuinely dangerous” warns a government official.
“[Choudary] was not given a sentence of enormous length but is somebody who is a genuinely dangerous person,” said the official. “We will be watching him very, very carefully.”
“Even if [Islamists like Choudary] are not themselves making bombs, they are a completely pernicious influence on the people they come into contact with and they need to be kept away from them.”
Choudary was the co-founder and leader terrorist group al-Muhajiroun whose followers included Khuram Butt, a member of the terror cell that killed eight people in the 2017 London Bridge terror attack.
Other disciples include Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, who drove into 25-year-old Lee Rigby and butchered his unconscious body with a cleaver and knives back in 2013.
The five-and-a-half sentence Choudary received is due to the alleged lack of exorbitant evidence called "multi-agency public protection arrangements" (MAPPA), according to the Prisons Minister.
“We have to put a very rich, full, MAPPA wrap around [extremists like Choudary] that includes everything going all the way up to MI5,” said the minister. “That’s GPS trackers, that’s police, that’s intelligence, watching every movement of their lives and restricting it incredibly closely because I’m in no doubt that these people are highly dangerous.”
Born in London and having attended university in England, Choudary officially dodged the law for decades because lawyers argued he was “merely exercising his freedom of speech over his interpretation of the Quran and Islam.”
The other co-founder of al-Muhajiroun is Omar Bakri Mohammed, who first met Choudary in a London suburban mosque; Bakri is banned from the UK and is currently in jail in Lebanon.
(PHOTO: Barcroft Media / Contributor / Getty Images)
