A convicted terrorist who confessed in a US jail to masterminding the 7/7 London bombings was wished “all the best” by a judge when he was on the cusp of being set free.
Haroon Aswat, 50, was jailed for 20 years in 2015 in New York after admitting to two terror-related offences.
He had been involved in attempting to set up a “terrorist training camp” in the US with radical cleric Abu Hamza in the 1990s.
In 2022, he was deported back to the UK, and was then detained in a secure hospital, having had a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.
In April, High Court judge Mr Justice Jay oversaw an application by the Metropolitan Police for a notification order for Aswat’s release, to monitor him when back with his family in West Yorkshire.
The judge was told that Aswat still poses a risk to the public, and mental illness exacerbates his religious extremism.
According to a transcript of the High Court hearing obtained by The Sun, the judge asked Aswat about his health and confirmed his intention to return to his family in Batley.
After asking if Aswat understood the requirements of the notification order, he suggested “you probably want to put all of this behind you now” and surmised that it “could not have been too pleasant being in American custody all that time”.
The judge added: “I have to wish you all the best and say to you that the way forward is to keep on your medication, listen to the advice you are going to get, and keep out of the sort of things you were doing.
“Because you saw where it ended up and you do not want to go back to that, I am sure.”
While in custody in the US, Aswat reportedly confessed to involvement in the 9/11 atrocity in New York and the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005.
Aswat was detained in Broadmoor hospital when he returned to the UK, and a psychiatrist found in 2022 that there “remains the risk of Islamic violent extremism”
The fact that he was held in a hospital rather than a prison prevented a formal terrorist risk assessment being carried out.
The judge found that Aswat continues to pose a risk of “violent extremism-motivated targeted terrorist offending behaviour given his threats to kill Jews, Christians and certain groups of Muslims”, and he could also “influence other vulnerable individuals, as when he is in an abnormal mental state his religious extremist rhetoric is amplified by mental illness”.
Aswat helped to set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon and Seattle in the US from 1999, which the American government described 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 Qaida”.
He then travelled to Afghanistan to receive training from al Qaida in 2001, and in 2005 was arrested in Zambia and extradited to the UK.
In August that year, he was then arrested in the UK because of an arrest warrant being issued for him in the US, and was eventually extradited.
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.
He was jailed for 20 years, but did not serve the full sentence due to “periods of detention in this country awaiting extradition” being taken into account.
