Golders Green exposes the lethal incompetence of Prevent

A history of ‘serious violence’. ‘Mental-health issues’. A previous referral to the UK’s counter-terrorsm programme. Though details about Essa Suleiman, the suspected Golders Green attacker, are still emerging, those we already know tell an all too familiar story.

Prior to being charged with the attempted murder of two Jewish men this Wednesday, the Somali-born British national’s record was far from squeaky clean. A sometime Somali interpreter for the Metropolitan Police, he had a violent altercation in 2008 with a policeman and his police dog, stabbing both with a bread knife. He was sentenced to prison indefinitely.

‘The most important thing’, said Andy Marsh, assistant chief constable of Wiltshire Police at the time, ‘is a very dangerous man has now been taken off the streets’. Of course, as we now know, Suleiman would not be kept off the streets nearly long enough. Despite being referred to the government’s counter-extremism Prevent programme in 2020, Suleiman’s case was – astonishingly – closed that same year. This begs the question of exactly what Prevent is so preoccupied with, if it is not keeping dangerous men like this under close surveillance.

Suleiman is far from a one-off oversight. If found guilty, he will merely be the latest in a long line of terrorists to have slipped Prevent’s rather loose net. In 2021, Conservative MP David Amess was stabbed 21 times during a constituency surgery in Leigh-on-Sea, in Essex. His attacker, the Islamic State-affiliated Ali Harbi Ali, was a graduate of Prevent’s deradicalisation programme. Prevent had ultimately decided he was no longer a threat. ‘I just knew to nod my head and say “yes”, and they would leave me alone afterwards’, Ali said later of the counter-terror case workers that he’d encountered.

Libyan-born Islamist Khairi Saadallah, who in 2020 undertook ‘an act of religious jihad’ and stabbed three men to death in a Reading park, was similarly overlooked. Saadallah had been referred to Prevent two years prior, only to have his case dismissed when no ‘fixed ideology’ could be determined. Then there’s Sudesh Amman, who stabbed two people in Streatham in 2019, and Ahmed Hassan, responsible for the 2017 Parsons Green bombing, who were also known to Prevent well before their respective attacks took place.

Usman Khan, who was convicted of taking part in an al-Qaeda-inspired bomb plot in 2012, participated in several Prevent schemes. He was widely considered a ‘success story’ of rehabilitation. In 2019, during an offender-rehabilitation conference, Khan strapped a pair of knives to his wrists and stabbed five people, killing two.

What all these terrorists have in common is they are Islamists. Prevent is astonishingly ill-equipped and even reticent to tackle Islamist extremism. This was highlighted by the 2023 Shawcross Review, which found that a mere 16 per cent of cases referred to Prevent in the year ending March 2022 were related to Islamist radicalisation. Given that Islamism is the focus of 75 per cent of ongoing counter-terror investigations in the UK, something is clearly going wrong here. Shawcross cites a ‘lack of training’ as well as a ‘culture of timidity among practitioners’ when it comes to tackling extremism of an Islamist nature. Apparently, even using the word ‘Islamist’ was a no-no among both funded and non-funded Prevent staff, who feared it would ‘act as a barrier to engagement with communities’.

Indeed, Islamism-related referrals to Prevent dropped a huge 72 per cent between 2017 and 2022. During that same period, far-right referrals began to take precedence. According to the government’s Standards and Compliance Unit Annual Report: 2024 to 2025, training reportedly involved ‘a disproportionate focus on extreme right wing in comparison to Islamist extremism, and excessive focus on wider influences and ideologies which do not reflect the predominant terrorist threat’. These ‘wider influences and ideologies’ were revealed to be socialism, anti-abortion, Brexit, gender-critical views, and those who rejected vaccinations.

Apparently, the enjoyment of certain authors was also a red flag for Prevent, with the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Lewis and Tolkien being indicative of potential far-right affiliations. The supposedly corrupting influence of TV shows like The Thick of It and Great British Railway Journeys was also noted – because nothing screams ‘fascist’ more than watching the flamboyantly-trousered Michael Portillo enthuse about steam trains.

Unless we arrive at some honesty about where the majority of terror threats within the UK are coming from, Suleiman will not be the last to give Prevent the slip. Unless Prevent starts taking Islamic extremism more seriously, then it will not prevent much of anything.

Georgina Mumford is a content producer at spiked.