The Islamist brotherhood inside our prisons I witnessed it first-hand By Steve Gallant

UN Herd : HMP Frankland, 2008. I was standing in the dinner queue near Kamel Bourgass when a single punch brought him crashing to the ground, his tray skidding across the tiled floor.

The wing fell silent. Seconds earlier, Bourgass, a convicted Algerian terrorist, had wrongly accused his attacker in broken English of trying to pinch something from his cell. The fist-shaped reply was swift and final. Officers surged in and marched the puncher to segregation. 

The queue shuffled on. The whole thing lasted seconds, but it captured something essential about the era: men convicted of terrorism were being dropped onto mainstream wings in some of Britain’s hardest prisons, one of the most self-defeating policy decisions of the last two decades.

The prisoner sprawled on the floor was no ordinary inmate. In 2003, during a counter-terrorism raid in Manchester, Bourgass stabbed four police officers; Detective Constable Stephen Oake later died of his wounds. Convicted of murder and given a life sentence with a minimum term of 22 years, he was later handed another 17-year sentence for his part in the so-called “ricin plot”. He was, in every sense, a defining figure of that early wave of al-Qaeda-linked offenders.

Two decades later, Bourgass is reported to be on the cusp of his first full parole review. The precise timings are unclear, but the decision may already have been made; Bourgass might walk out of prison as early as this month. The Parole Board’s role is not to punish retrospective horror, but to weigh current risk: it must assess the man before them, not the man he was. And yet, as Bourgass’s minimum tariff is now expiring, the country is left with a more uncomfortable question: what does “rehabilitation” really mean when the beliefs behind the violence are so hard to change?

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