Jeremy Corbyn has backed the police who shot a convicted terrorist dead on London Bridge during a knife rampage that left two dead.
Speaking to Sophy Ridge on Sky News this morning, the Labour leader also said that convicted terrorists should "not necessarily" serve their full prison terms.
Mr Corbyn, has previously been critical of shoot-to-kill policies, that the officers had "no other choice" but to kill convicted terrorist 28-year-old Usman Khan.
Speaking on Ridge on Sunday, he said: "I think they [police] had no choice.
"They were stuck in an awful situation where there was a credible threat of a bomb belt around his body.
"It's an awful situation for any police officer or any public servant to be put in."
Mr Corbyn added: “The point I made in the past, particularly in relation to Northern Ireland - this is going back quite a long way - was there was a concern in Northern Ireland that police were adopting a shoot to kill policy where it was possible to arrest them instead of shoot them.
“There should never be a first alternative to shoot people. But if there is no alternative then that’s what you do.”
Khan stabbed 25-year-old Jack Merritt and a woman to death in the knife rampage on Friday afternoon, which left three other people injured.
The killer was on licence and wearing an electronic monitoring tag when he attended a conference on prisoner rehabilitation hosted by Cambridge University scheme Learning Together at Fishmongers' Hall near London Bridge.
The attack has prompted the Ministry of Justice to review the licence conditions of every convicted terrorist released from prison, which is understood to be around 70 people.
Khan was released last year on licence after serving eight years of a 16-year-prison sentence for terrorism offences.
Asked whether convicted terrorists should serve all the time handed down to them, Mr Corbyn said: "Not necessarily."
He added: "I think it depends on the circumstances and it depends on the sentence but crucially depends on what they've done in prison.
"I think there has to be an examination of how our prison services work and crucially what happens to them on release from prison."
