Now as many readers of this blog will by now understand, I despise the ideology of Islam. I despise it because I understand the history of Islam and its contacts with other societies and I observe daily the depredations and the violence that Islam brings both to its followers and to those outside of Islam. It is in my opinion, a bad ideology and little different in that respect from Stalinism or Nazism.

However my hatred for Islam does not extend to individual Muslims. Unlike the political Left I can separate the ideology from the individual and have met plenty of those who are Muslim who are still decent individuals. But they are in my view decent in spire of Islam not because of Islam as good fruit does not come from bad or diseased trees, they are inherently decent rather than made that way by Islam. There are also Muslims who understand little about what Islam is all about, who are still under the misapprehension that it is a peaceful belief system and are appalled and disgusted by the violence done in Islam’s name.

It is regarding one of those Muslims that acted on their disgust at Islamic violence and hatred this piece is about. It is also about the shoddy and incompetent way that a man’s concerns about a radicalising relative were treated by the British security authorities. The result of the anti terrorism officers failure to properly assess the concerns of the man who communicated with the police regarding his relative, was the occurrence of the London Bridge terror attack. In addition it is a story about the betrayal of a man who in good faith provided information about a radicalising relative that could, if the police had done their jobs properly, have stopped an attack in which eight people died.

According to a June 4^th report by Sky News, one of a series of reports that various media outlets have published on the subject of the long running inquest into the deaths of those killed in the London Bridge attack, Khuram Butt, one of the murderers could have been stopped before the attack. Sky News said that Usman Darr, Butt’s brother-in-law, contacted a police antiterrorism hotline and reported his concerns about Butt. Mr Darr told the police that Butt was becoming more and more extreme in his religious and political beliefs and was distributing extremist material. Mr Darr informed the anti terror hotline that Butt had undergone a radical change in his life and was sending out anti-Western propaganda texts and links to jihadi online resources.

Sky News reported that the police and the Security Service MI5 were already interested in Butt but neither the MI5 team nor the police team were informed of the call from Mr Darr or that the information that he passed on was forwarded to these agencies by the Counterterrorism hotline team. This meant that the threat from Butt was downgraded from ‘active’ to ‘aspirational’ by the MI5 team and the police did not believe that the arrest of Butt for the jihad propaganda would stop any active terror plots. Butt had also had a prominent media profile and had appeared in a Channel Four programme called ‘The Jihadis Next Door’. There seemed to be plenty enough evidence to paint Butt as a wrong’un but the information from Mr Darr, if passed on and acted upon by the police and the Security Service would have been the icing on the cake. It would have been the missing piece of the jigsaw that illustrated just how dangerous Butt was becoming.

The incompetence shown by the police here is staggering. Not only did they not pass on vital information about Butt to those who were investigating, but they also failed to contact Mr Darr himself. It’s a basic failure of information gathering, whether for law enforcement or journalistic purposes,to fail to call back a source of information.

Mr Darr should have been contacted as soon as was practicable in order for Mr Darr to elaborate on his concerns about Butt and his behaviour. This would have gathered more information about Butt and his intentions that could have been used by the police to properly assess Butt’s danger. It is quite possible that of the London Bridge attackers, Butt at least could have been taken out by means of arrest and being charged with dissemination of terrorist material. This would have disrupted the London Bridge attackers and their plans.

The police seem to have badly screwed up here. There are standard procedures in many organisations, not just law enforcement ones, about the handling and assessing of information. The approach to the police by a member of the public with information about a radicalising Muslim should have been taken more seriously than it seems to have been taken. I’m not a police officer and never have been but I’m appalled by the way that the police have handled both the source of the information and the information itself.

The existence of the call and the information that it contained should,in my opinion, have been referred up the management chain as soon as it came in order to assess it further. Also it will be senior management teams who will most likely be in possession of links to an MI5 liaison person in order to get the information to where it needs to be. This does not seem to have been done. Information has not been properly passed on and Mr Darr and his trust that the authorities can stop radical Muslims killing innocents has been betrayed. This looks like another shameful and incompetent performance by the police and one that went on to have terrible consequences.