by Tim Black, spiked
Manchester Arena terrorist Hashem Abedi’s rampage in prison is only the latest in a long line of failures.
It’s no secret that Hashem Abedi is a violent, murderous Islamist. The 28-year-old was sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum term of 55 years, in 2020, for helping his brother, Salman Abedi, carry out the horrific Manchester Arena bombing in 2017. A few months after being incarcerated, Hashem, alongside two other prisoners, then engaged in what a judge described as a ‘vicious’, premeditated attack on a prison officer. There was little doubt that they would have killed him if they’d been able to.
This is why the news that Abedi was able to attack several other prison officers at HMP Frankland on Saturday, stabbing them with ‘homemade’ weapons and throwing hot cooking oil over them, is so disturbing. After all, HMP Frankland is a high-security, category A prison. It is used to house some of the most dangerous individuals in the UK. The fact that a known, violent, high-profile killer was able to manufacture his own weapons and gain access to scalding cooking oil, in what ought to be one of the most surveilled places in the British Isles, beggars belief.
Abedi’s attack, which has put three officers in hospital with what were swiftly reported to be ‘life-threatening injuries’, is an indictment of our prisons. It points to a carceral system that is seemingly unable to deal with the Islamist threat posed from within.