A police officer who monitored Fishmongers’ Hall attacker Usman Khan after he was released from prison has told a jury she was “shocked” by how friendly he was.
Constable Victoria Barker, from the counter-terrorism Prevent team with Staffordshire Police, said she had expected Khan to be aggressive and anti-authority but he was “the complete opposite”.
She met Khan three days after his release from prison in 2018, after he served eight years for his part in a plot to set up a terrorist training camp in Pakistan.
Khan murdered Cambridge graduates Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones at a prisoner education event at Fishmongers’ Hall in the City of London in November 2019.
He was one of Khan’s original co-defendants and associates in a Stoke-based cell of Islamist extremists.
Sergeant Calum Forsyth, one of the Staffordshire Police Prevent officers who managed Khan, acknowledged that the Rahman case had “not gone well” on Tuesday.
The hearing was shown a risk assessment completed on 6 November 2019, around three weeks before Khan’s deadly rampage, finding no terrorist intent, weak terrorist engagement and moderate capability.
Sgt Forsyth defended his ratings and said that probation officers carried out more detailed risk assessments.
“At the time with what I was assessing and what I was seeing it felt right,” he added.