British Sri Lankan Streatham terrorist had been released early from prison

LONDON: Sudesh Amman, shot dead by police in the London suburb of Streatham on Sunday after going on a stabbing spree, had been jailed for three years and four months after pleading guilty in December 2018 to 13 counts of possessing and distributing terrorist documents. But he was released early — within the past six weeks — after serving less than half his sentence, sparking calls in Britain for a relook at the early release of those convicted for terrorism-related offences.
On Monday UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised to bring forward legislation to “stop the system of automatic early release of prisoners”.
In 2018, at the time of his conviction, he had been a student at North West London College.
London mayor Sadiq Khan claimed the attack had been “foreseeable”. “We know there are more than 200 convicted terrorists in prison and we also know that there are 70 plus who have been released onto our streets. What reassurance can I receive from the government that these people are properly being punished and reformed,” he said.
The 20-year-old terrorist was a British national born to Haleema Khan (41) and Faraz Khan, who are from Sri Lanka, the Daily Mail reported.
He had asked his mother for his favourite mutton biryani just hours before he went on the stabbing spree that left three people injured and resulted in him being shot dead.
It has now emerged that the undercover cops who shot Amman had been following him on foot prior to the attack and that he stole a knife from a convenience store before stabbing his victims. ISIS has since claimed responsibility, describing him as “a fighter of Islamic State”.
His father is currently in Sri Lanka. A Muslim, Amman was raised, alongside his five younger brothers, by his mother in Harrow, north London.
Amman’s grieving mother, Haleema Faraz Khan, who now lives in Dunstable, told Sky News that her “polite and lovely” son seemed “fine” when she last took food to him at his bail hostel on Thursday.
He had been staying the past two weeks at the hostel one mile away from where the attack happened. Police were searching that hostel and another address in Hertfordshire on Monday.
Amman called his mother on Sunday morning asking her to make him some mutton biryani. “He said: ‘Mum I want some biryani… your mutton biryani.’ Before he went to prison he was not that religious. After he came out he was really religious, that’s where I think he became radicalised,” his mother said.
She said he regularly went to the mosque but got radicalised watching Islamist videos online.
She first came to know he was involved in the attack when he was named on TV news, before the police visited her. But she said as soon as she had heard a terrorist attack had occurred in Streatham, she had a feeling it was her son. “He didn’t answer his phone, I tried to ring him after the attack,” she said, adding she wanted to bury him in Britain.
The Old Bailey in December 2018 heard that he had tried to radicalise his own family by sharing Al Qaeda propaganda in a family WhatsApp group, and sharing bomb-making manuals via Skype chat, exposing his brothers, aged 11 to 15, and extended family in Sri Lanka, to jihadist material.
The court heard he had sent beheading videos to his girlfriend and advised her to kill her “kaffir” parents and that he had fantasised about carrying out terror attacks with knives and acid. At the time the then head of the Met police counter-terrorism command, acting commander Alexis Boon, recovered a notepad from the family home. “Amman had scrawled his ‘life goals’ and top of the list was dying a martyr and going to ‘jannah (paradise)’ — the afterlife,” he said.