London Bridge stabbing attack suspect was released last year after terrorism conviction - NBCNews.com

LONDON — British police were scrambling Saturday to work out how a man convicted of terrorism offenses managed to carry out a deadly stabbing attack on London Bridge a year after his release from prison.

Usman Khan, 28, was attending an event for a program that works to rehabilitate prisoners before launching the attack that saw him stab several people and brandish what turned out to be a fake suicide vest. He was shot dead by officers after members of the public intervened.

Two others were killed in the attack.

Nov. 29, 201901:38

"This individual was known to authorities," Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu said Friday night. "Clearly, a key line of inquiry now is to establish how he came to carry out this attack."

Khan had been convicted in 2012 for his part in an al-Qaeda-inspired plot to blow up the London Stock Exchange. He was originally given a 16-year prison term but was released early “on license,” meaning he had to meet certain conditions or face being locked up again.

The circumstances of the attack could elevate the issues of terrorism and criminal justice just weeks ahead of a crucial Dec. 12 election that has thus far been dominated by Brexit and health care.

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Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed the subject before chairing a meeting of the government's emergency committee late Friday.

Johnson said he had "long argued" that it is a "mistake to allow serious and violent criminals to come out of prison early."

"It is very important that we get out of that habit and that we enforce the appropriate sentences for dangerous criminals, especially for terrorists, that I think the public will want to see," Johnson said.

Nov. 29, 201900:52

Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said he was horrified by the attack.

"We must and we will stand together to reject hatred and division," said Corbyn, who trails Johnson in opinion polls.

Both leaders said they would scale back campaigning in the immediate wake of the attack.

The attack will likely prompt British police to review the conditions placed on released convicts, junior interior minister Brandon Lewis told BBC radio Saturday.

"There are conditions that are put on people in this situation and one of the things the police will be looking at is those conditions as part of that investigation," said Lewis.

Ahead of the attack, Khan had been attending an event called Learning Together at Fishmongers' Hall, a historic building adjacent to the bridge, police said.

Learning Together is a program led by Cambridge University which aims to provide education to people in prison alongside university students.

"I am devastated to learn that today's hateful attack on London Bridge may have been targeted at staff, students and alumni," Cambridge University president Stephen Toope said in a statement.

In addition to the suspect, a man and a woman were killed in the attack while three other people — one man and two women — were wounded and taken to hospital.

It remains unclear whether the victims were affiliated with the university.

Khan was living in Staffordshire, about 150 miles north of London, and police were searching his address late Friday. Police said they are not actively investigating other suspects.

Linda Givetash

Linda Givetash is a reporter based in London. She previously worked for The Canadian Press in Vancouver and Nation Media in Uganda. 

Reuters contributed.

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2019-11-30 10:26:00Z
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How an Anti-Brexit London District Could Help Boris Johnson Triumph - The New York Times

LONDON — The Labour Party canvassers gathered after dark outside a tube station in Pimlico, a pocket of central London that, by all appearances, should be fertile terrain. Nearly three-quarters of the surrounding district voted to stay in the European Union, among the strongest “Remain” votes in Britain, putting the pro-Brexit Conservatives at risk in a seat they had held since the district lines were drawn in 1950.

But the district, the Cities of London and Westminster, with its rows of white stucco townhouses and crowded housing projects, may now become a parable on the left for why Prime Minister Boris Johnson holds a commanding position less than two weeks before the election.

Brexit has sent tremors through the British political system, shaking up the traditional left-right, class-based divisions. While the Conservatives have capitalized on the upheaval, building a coalition of pro-Brexit voters across regional and class lines, the left has so far struggled to win converts and overcome its own divisions.

Mr. Johnson is on course for a 68-seat majority in Parliament, a major new polling analysis showed, with Labour hemorrhaging pro-Brexit seats in working-class sections of middle and northern England and a fractured left failing to win significant numbers of anti-Brexit seats in the south that seemed ripe for the taking.

With Mr. Johnson still deeply unpopular, undecided voters may yet swing Labour’s way. Recent polls suggest the Conservative lead has begun to shrink, putting many seats with razor-thin margins potentially in play. But Labour’s leftist leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has lately dug in against accusations of anti-Semitism in the party and criticisms that his Brexit policy was incoherent.

Setting off from the tube station last week, the scores of Labour canvassers were quickly confronted with a treacherous political rip tide: Labourites turned off by Mr. Corbyn; die-hard Remainers who, fed up with Labour’s ever-evolving stance on Brexit, had decamped to the staunchly anti-Brexit Liberal Democrats; and even former Remainers who now resignedly conceded that democracy demanded Brexit be done.

“It’s desperate times — it’s very difficult to know how to vote,” Philip Rudge, 73, who lives in the east of the district, said a few days earlier. “I’ve been Labour all my life, but I’ve been dismayed to see the infighting and back-stabbing and so on. Corbyn’s not a leader. Labour will have to win an election against the leadership.”

This London district, known informally as the Two Cities, is in many respects a mirror image of pro-Brexit, working-class Labour strongholds in northern England being targeted by the Conservatives. Stocked with bankers and lawyers who once made up the Conservative base, but who want to stay in the European Union, the Two Cities is precisely the kind of seat that Brexit could help deliver to a left-leaning party.

But with Mr. Corbyn failing to ignite the enthusiasm he did in 2017, and some right-wing anti-Brexit voters drifting back into the Conservative fold, the widely prophesied new coalition of the left has not materialized.

In the Two Cities, the left is also suffering from a second problem: the anti-Brexit vote being split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, a smaller, more centrist party that has stormed back from obscurity by arguing for lawmakers to summarily reverse Brexit.

Anti-Brexit activists are pleading with people to vote tactically — meaning to vote for whichever Remain party stands the best chance of winning a given seat — and polls suggest that Britons are doing so in greater numbers than before, for good reason. While there are roughly half a dozen parties in Britain’s Brexit-battered Parliament, only one can win any given seat: When supporters of a given cause split their votes between several candidates, they risk letting an opponent come through the middle.

But disagreements on the economy and foreign policy still run deep on the left. And with the Liberal Democrats neck-and-neck with Labour in districts like the Two Cities, that has left even the most calculating anti-Brexit voters confused about what to do.

“I would say I’m a tactical voter normally, but it’s not clear at this stage what the tactic should be,” said Fern Watson, 36, who is opposed to Brexit, bracing against the cold in the Barbican, a brutalist estate on the eastern edge of the district. “I don’t really see either Labour or the Lib Dems as my natural political home, and I think a lot of people of my age and education level feel the same.”

She had visited three different websites purporting to tell people how to vote in individual precincts to stop Brexit. One of them said Labour, and the other two the Liberal Democrats.

Current polling suggests the Remain vote will split in the Two Cities, allowing a weakened Conservative candidate to hold the seat. Across the country, were only 120,000 more Remainers to vote tactically, one analysis showed, that would be enough to defeat Mr. Johnson on Dec. 12.

But for now, in crucial London districts, the race has become a battle of bar charts, as both Labour and the Liberal Democrats try to prove they are best positioned to win three-way fights for seats. Labour has printed reams of them showing how it cut into the Conservatives’ lead in the 2017 election, capitalizing on the same shifts that have turned American cities into progressive bulwarks.

But the Liberal Democrats, relying on more recent polling, have distributed their own sheafs of charts with exactly the opposite message.

Couple that with the hazy mechanics of how a left-wing coalition would actually try to stop Brexit, and Remain voters are stuck in a confusing predicament.

“If you are a Leave voter, the route to your destination is now really clear and simple,” said Rob Ford, a politics professor and the editor of “Sex, Lies and Politics: The Secret Influences That Drive our Political Choices.” “Whereas if you’re on the Remain side, what’s the route to your desired destination? It’s as clear as the channel on a foggy day right now.”

Remain voters are torn by Mr. Corbyn’s cautious, some would say muddled, Brexit policy, in which he would negotiate a new exit deal with Brussels and then put it beside Remain in a public vote in which he himself would stay neutral.

One voter, Philip Jeremy, 60, asked about Labour’s Brexit policy, said bluntly: “Corbyn doesn’t have one.” So desperate is Mr. Jeremy not to see either major party steering the country that he said he wanted the election to deliver no clear signals at all.

“I prefer a hung Parliament, just so none of them do anything too drastic,” Mr. Jeremy said.

Sitting as it does at the heart of London, the Two Cities district covers not only Buckingham Palace and Parliament but also the well-mannered homes of many senior lawmakers, making it a trophy scalp for the opposition.

But it also has considerable areas of poverty, where allegiances to Labour are strong and its message should resonate: The party has focused heavily on health care, housing, climate change and income inequality.

Those policies have drawn some pro-Brexit voters into the fold, like Jalil Abdul, 75, who has lived for four decades in Walden House, a public housing block in Pimlico that had been targeted for redevelopment by a 28-year-old billionaire.

“This year, I like the Labour Party,” Mr. Abdul said, “because for the last three years the Conservative Party has failed at doing anything.”

But polls suggest many anti-Brexit Conservatives are sticking by Mr. Johnson, not out of love and admiration for him as much as fear and loathing for his opponent, Mr. Corbyn.

“We have a choice of one of two prime ministers, either Boris, or Jeremy Corbyn,” said Christopher Wyke, 64, a Conservative who lives and works in the City of London, the financial district, and who himself supports Brexit. “If you vote for anybody but the Conservatives, you risk getting Corbyn, so there’s no choice. Even people who are Remainers, they still don’t want Corbyn. He’d be infinitely more dangerous.”

And the Liberal Democrats have alienated some voters who might otherwise be amenable to their centrist economic policies by taking a stark position on Brexit: revoking it altogether, without a public vote.

Even anti-Brexit Labourites are no longer a shoo-in to vote against the Conservatives.

Gordon Nardell, the Labour candidate, broke off from the party activists outside the tube station last week to knock on some doors alone. The first answer seemed to startle him: a middle-aged man who said he was a longtime Labour supporter and backed Remain in 2016, but now wanted Mr. Johnson to get Brexit done.

“The vote was to leave, so you know, recognize the vote,” the man said. “To me, once you vote, that’s it — you either accept it, or if you don’t accept it, democracy means nothing.”

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2019-11-30 08:21:00Z
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London Bridge attacker had previous conviction for terrorism offenses - CNBC

A forensic investigator takes photographs by London Bridge after a number of people are believed to have been injured after a stabbing, police have said, on November 29, 2019 in London, England. Police said they were called to the stabbing around 2:00 pm local time. Video shared on social media after the incident showed armed officers opening fire on a man who had been pinned down on the bridge walkway. Metropolitan Police said they believed there were several injuries and that a man had been detained.

Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images

The London Bridge attacker who killed two people on Friday has been named as 28-year-old Usman Khan who was known to authorities and had been convicted in 2012 for terrorism offenses.

In a statement overnight, the U.K.'s Met Police said the individual was released from prison in December 2018 on license, adding that a key line of the enquiry was now to establish how he came to carry out this attack.

The attacker had attended a prisoner rehabilitation event called "Learning Together" on Friday afternoon at Fishmonger's Hall on the north side of the bridge. The Met believes the knife attack began inside before he left the building and proceeded onto the bridge, where he was detained and subsequently shot dead by armed officers.

The suspect was initially restrained by members of the public and he appeared to be wearing a bomb vest which was later said to be "a hoax explosive device."

One man and one woman were killed during the attack. Three others, a man and two women, were also injured and remain in hospital. Health officials have said one of the injured is in a critical but stable condition.

This undated photo provided by West Midlands Police shows Usman Khan. UK counterterrorism police are searching for clues into an attack that left two people dead and three injured near London Bridge. Police said Saturday, Nov. 30, 2019, Khan, who was imprisoned six years for terrorism offenses before his release last year stabbed several people in London on Friday, Nov. 29, before being tackled by members of the public and shot dead by officers on the London Bridge.

West Midlands Police via AP

The police said it was not actively seeking anyone else in relation to the attack, but were carrying out searches at an address in Staffordshire, in the West Midlands of England, where Khan is believed to have lived.

"Public safety is our top priority and we are enhancing police patrols in the City and across London," Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu for the Met Police said in a statement. Earlier this month, the country downgraded its terrorism threat level from "severe" to "substantial."

The BBC reported that Usman Khan was sentenced to "indeterminate detention" in 2012 with a minimum jail term of eight years, adding that it would have allowed him to be kept in prison beyond that minimum term. The prosecution at the time said the plotters, including Khan, had discussed attacking the London Stock Exchange as well as pubs in the English city of Stoke.

In 2013, the U.K.'s Court of Appeal quashed that sentence and replaced it with a 16-year-fixed term with half of it being spent in jail.

The U.K.'s Times Newspaper reported on Saturday that the convicted terrorist was released from jail last year after agreeing to wear an electronic tag to monitor his movements.

Friday's incident came 2½ years after eight people were killed and 48 were injured in a terrorist vehicle-ramming and stabbings along London Bridge, which links the capital's business district with the south bank of the River Thames.

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2019-11-30 07:09:00Z
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London Bridge: People 'injured' after stabbing - BBC News

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A number of people are believed to have been injured after a stabbing at London Bridge, police have said.

The Met Police said they were called to a stabbing at a premises near the bridge just before 14:00.

The force said it had detained a man. London Ambulance Service has declared a "major incident".

The BBC's John McManus, at the scene, said he had seen a group of men in a fight on the bridge. Police then arrived and shots were fired, he said.

British Transport Police said London Bridge station was currently closed and no trains would be stopping there.

Police have advised people near the scene to follow directions from officers on the ground.

The prime minister tweeted he was being updated on the incident and wanted to thank police and all emergency services for their response.

Home Secretary Priti Patel also tweeted that she was "very concerned" about the incident.

• Follow the latest updates

McManus told the BBC News channel: "Just a few minutes ago I was walking across London Bridge on the south bank to the north bank of the bridge.

"There appeared to be a fight going on on the other side of the bridge, with several men attacking one man.

"Police then quickly arrived, including armed police, and then a number of shots were fired at this man."

Media playback is unsupported on your device

A video has emerged showing police officers aiming guns at a white lorry that jack-knifed across London Bridge.

The footage shows several officers surrounding the vehicle before moving to the rear to check its container.

London buses can be seen either side of the lorry while three police cars are parked next to it on the bridge.

Noa Bodner, who is stuck in a restaurant on London Bridge, told BBC News channel: "There was a rush of people coming in and everybody basically dived under the tables.

"We were told to keep away from the windows, people that came from the outside were saying that shots were fired."

She said the manager ran to lock the doors and staff told people to move away from the front of the restaurant.

She said the mood was "calm", "some people seem a bit distressed, but they're being looked after by friends or staff".

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2019-11-29 14:20:03Z
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Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi says he will resign - CNN

People set off fireworks as they celebrated his resignation in Baghdad's Tahrir Square, after anti-government protests, which began on October 1, swept through the country against alleged government corruption and Iranian involvement in the country's affairs.

In the statement, Abdul Mahdi said he would submit a resignation request to parliament "to consider its options, with the knowledge that those near and far are aware that I had already made this decision known."

He called on Iraq's government to "act in the interests of Iraq; to preserve the blood of its people; and to avoid slipping into a cycle of violence, chaos and devastation."

Abdul Mahdi said his resignation was in response to the Friday sermon of Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who referenced the "failure of respective agencies to handle developments over the past two months."

Abdul Mahdi had initially agreed to resign on October 31 on the condition that a successor was agreed to replace him.

Days of violence

The news comes after the Iranian consulate in the southern city of Najaf was attacked on Wednesday. Mahdi ordered an investigation on Thursday into the deaths of at least 31 people.

More than 1,000 people were injured over three days of demonstrations across Iraq from November 26 to November 28, the country's Independent High Commission for Human Rights said Thursday.

In total, more than 300 people have been killed and 15,000 injured in Iraq since the protests began. Protesters have demanded the government step down and hold early elections under direct supervision of the United Nations, activists told CNN.

Many Iraqis blame the current political parties in power for their economic hardship.

Officials have imposed curfews, internet blackouts, and deployed lethal force in attempts to quash the protests. The government said it only shoots when attacked, but demonstrators have disputed that.

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2019-11-29 14:14:00Z
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Trump makes first visit to Afghanistan, reopening peace talks with Taliban - CBS This Morning

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2019-11-29 12:21:38Z
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Californian mountain climber Brad Gobright dies in Mexico fall - USA TODAY

Associated Press

Published 5:10 AM EST Nov 29, 2019

MEXICO CITY – Civil defense officials in northern Mexico have confirmed the death of California mountain climber Brad Gobright in a fall.

The fall occurred at an almost sheer rock face known as Sendero Luminoso on the El Potrero Chico peak near the northern city of Monterrey.

The Nuevo Leon state civil defense office said Thursday that Gobright fell about 300 meters (yards).

The publication Rock and Ice described the 31-year-old Gobright as a native of Orange County, California, who was “one of the most accomplished free solo climbers in the world.”

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2019-11-29 10:11:00Z
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