If the most recent terrorist attack in London had been an episode in a novel by a social satirist, it would have been dismissed as too crude or absurd to be plausible. Nothing like it could ever take place in reality.
Last week, Usman Khan attended a conference at Fishmongers' Hall, a grand location in Central London, marking the fifth anniversary of a rehabilitative program for prisoners called Learning Together, run by Cambridge University's Institute of Criminology. Suddenly, Khan, wielding a knife and wearing an imitation suicide-bomber's vest, went on a rampage, killing a graduate of the Institute who helped run the conference and a volunteer worker at the event, also a Cambridge graduate, as well as injuring three people. If Khan had not been stopped on London Bridge by others attending the conference—including a convicted murderer on day-release from prison, nearing the end of his sentence for having strangled and cut the throat of a mentally handicapped young woman, apparently for the fun or pleasure of it—he would have killed others.
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