Islamist terror lags to be grouped in ‘Jihadi’ wing to stamp out ‘potentially lethal’ prison radicalisation

HARDCORE Islamist terror lags are set to be grouped in a max security ‘Jihadi’ wing to stamp out "potentially lethal" prison radicalisation.

Michael Gove yesterday said he was “very sympathetic” to the key recommendation of a withering Government-backed report by a former prison governor.

The ex-governor Ian Acheson had earlier told MPs it was critical that Islamist extremists in prisons are “incapacitated” by being placed together in an isolation unit, to keep them away from other young and impressionable prisoners.

The 100-page Acheson Report was due out earlier this year but was sat on by No.10 ahead of the Referendum.

A leak in February revealed a proposal to set up a ‘British Alcatraz’ for Islamist terrorist prisoners.

Mr Acheson insisted yesterday that rather than an ‘Alcatraz’ the unit should be as “ordinary” as possible but “isolated from the rest of the prison”.

The former-governor of Northern Ireland's Maze Prison, which held parliamentary prisoners from the 1970s until 2000, claimed there is intelligence showing that there are a number of prisoners preaching dangerous ideology who "need to be completely incapacitated from being able to proselytise the rest of the prison population."

Mr Acheson also tore into the Prison Service for failing to appreciate how serious the problem was, claiming there had been an “institutional timidity” in tackling the issue and it defied belief that training programmes for prison guards still referred to Al-Qaeda rather than “ISIS or Daesh”.

He called for more category B prisons to be brought into the high security estate to improve staffing levels. And he recommended more guards were recruited from Muslim communities.
There are 12,000 Muslims in jails across England and Wales, 100 of whom were imprisoned for terrorism offences.
Mr Acheson said he had not been able to find evidence of Islamist extremists are deliberately getting custodial sentences in a bid to radicalise other prisoners, as was claimed by The Prison Officers Association in December.

But he added that jails in France, Spain and the Netherlands had already started to separate out jihadist prisoners from others with good results.
He added: “It’s not about prisons for Muslims or prisons for terrorists.
“It is a nuanced response that holds out the possibility of redemption.”

Mr Gove insisted he was keen to back the “overwhelming” number of 65 recommendations made by the report but that the ultimate decision would be taken by the new Home Secretary.