A clampdown on sentencing for extremists in response to Friday’s London Bridge attack will “turn terrorists into martyrs”, a friend of murdered graduate Saskia Jones warned today.
Miss Jones, 23, was stabbed to death alongside fellow Cambridge graduate Jack Merritt, 25, by convicted terrorist Usman Khan, 28, at a prisoner education conference near London Bridge.
A political blame-game has broken out after it emerged Khan had been released halfway through a 16-year prison sentence imposed for plotting to bomb the London Stock Exchange despite being considered a serious risk to the public.
Sebastian Lefeuvre, a friend of Miss Jones, said rowing back on progressive sentences in the wake of the killings would be disastrous.
He said: “If we go round saying, ‘Let’s lock him up and throw the key away’, it would make a shrine of a would-be terrorist. If we bring back capital punishment we’re making a martyr … We need to come together now and say, ‘Look, how can we as a nation get over this? A 23-year-old is dead, a 25-year-old is dead’.”
He said Miss Jones, from Stratford-upon-Avon, was an “amazing person” with a “beautiful soul”, telling Sky News: “As soon as she smiled, the world changed. You meet Saskia for a moment and she’d leave a lifetime impression. She always saw the best in people — no doubt she saw the best in, unfortunately, a very, very bad man.”
Friend Colleen Moore, a criminology lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, called her “fearless and a warrior”.
“She stood out above everyone — partly because she wanted to, she wasn’t afraid to say anything,” she said. “There was no fooling her. She was really funny, she had a wicked sense of humour, she was cheeky and she was mischievous.” Politicians have sought to deflect blame for the first fatal terrorist attack in London since 2017.
Boris Johnson accused Labour of being soft on terrorism and vowed to end the early release of inmates convicted of terrorist crimes, saying the issue of whether extremists can be de-radicalised was “a very profound question”.
The response prompted a fierce reaction from Mr Merritt’s father Dave, who said his son would be “livid” if his death was “used to perpetuate an agenda of hate that he gave his everything fighting against.”
Writing in the Guardian, Mr Merritt said: “Jack believed in the inherent goodness of humanity, and felt a deep social responsibility to protect that.”
The tributes came a day after details emerged of how Polish kitchen porter Lukasz Koczocik kept the attacker at bay inside Fishermongers’ Hall using a 7ft pike he had grabbed from the wall. His brave actions allowed others in the building to escape.
