Mick Hartley

Once again legal bureaucracy triumphs over plain morality and common sense. From the Telegraph:

An Islamist killer who took a prison officer hostage and demanded the release of hate preacher Abu Qatada has won a £240,000 battle over taxpayer-funded compensation and legal costs.

David Lammy, the Justice Secretary, has agreed to pay £7,500 in compensation and foot a £234,000 legal bill for Fuad Awale, a convicted double murderer, after a judge ruled that his treatment in jail breached his human rights.

Awale was transferred to a special separation unit for the country’s most dangerous prisoners after he and another inmate ambushed the prison officer and threatened to kill him unless Britain released Qatada.

He claimed this segregation – designed to prevent him harming officers and radicalising other inmates – had breached his right to a private life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Awale claimed that he had suffered “severe depression” as a result of being denied contact with other inmates.

The court was told he had asked to associate with one of the Islamist extremist killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby but was denied the request owing to “counter-terrorism concerns”.

Those silly counter-terrorism concerns.

The High Court ruled in Awale’s favour, with a judge saying: “The degree of interference with the claimant’s private life which has resulted from his removal from association has been of some significance and duration.”

Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, warned that the Awale judgment could open the floodgates to similar legal actions by extremists and put the safety of prison officers at risk if dangerous offenders could not be safely segregated.

“It’s a sick joke that taxpayers are handing this man £7,500 in compensation and footing a legal bill of over £230,000. This is a double murderer and extremist who took a prison officer hostage,” he said.

So why was this Awale in prison?

Awale is serving a life sentence for shooting two men in the head in 2011 in what a judge described as a planned “execution”.

Aged 25, he was sentenced to a minimum of 38 years prison in January 2013 after killing Mohammed Abdi Farah, 19, and Amin Ahmed Ismail, 18, in an alleyway in Milton Keynes over a drugs dispute.