Council agrees to remove Staffordshire terrorist's name from report over 'far right' concerns
The name of a Staffordshire terrorist who killed two people in the London Bridge attacks is to be removed from a council report over concerns including it could play into the hands of far right extremists.
Usman Khan, from Stoke-on-Trent but who had a flat in Stafford, was responsible for the attack at Fishmongers Hall in 2019. At an event to help ex-offenders, he fatally wounded Prisoner Education Scheme volunteers Saskia Jones, 23, and 25-year-old Jack Merritt, before being shot dead by police.
But at a meeting of Staffordshire county council’s Safeguarding Overview and Scrutiny Committee on Monday, which was receiving the chief coroner’s report outlining how future deaths could be prevented following the inquests of Khan’s two victims, debate focused on the inclusion of Khan’s name in the report.
One member claimed that including Khan’s name and ethnic background could provoke an increase in hate crime, while an opponent said the authority should be wary of “watering down” information that was in the public domain.
At the meeting, Councillor Gillian Pardesi said: “Can I suggest those two details are removed please? My concern is that mentioning the name of this person, who happens to be of Pakistani descent, further demonises the Muslim community and it embeds in people out there a stereotypical profile of what an extremist is.
“We are in dire financial straits as a country and the far-right in particular will look for scapegoats to exploit that situation. Unfortunately that has meant, and will continue to mean, a further rise in hate crime and attacks on our Muslim members in particular.
“It also detracts from the fact that we have, in the world as a whole, a far more far-right and neo-Nazi threat than we have now of Islamist jihads. The NSPCC recently reported that a record number of our children are now being groomed by the far-right.
