UK Releases Al-Qaeda-Linked Terror Suspect Tied to 7/7 London Bombings Despite Security Warnings

LONDON (VINnews) – Haroon Aswat, a British national with longstanding ties to al-Qaeda and the 2005 London suicide bombings that killed 52 people, has been released from a secure psychiatric hospital, authorities confirmed this week, prompting criticism from officials who say he remains a national security risk.

Aswat, 50, was discharged from Bethlem Royal Hospital in Bromley, southeast London, following a High Court ruling last year that he could be freed after completing treatment for mental illness, according to reports in The Telegraph and other British media outlets.

He is expected to return to family in Batley, West Yorkshire, where he will live under a Home Office notification order requiring him to report his address, any vehicles and foreign travel plans. He will be subject to monitoring but is not under electronic tagging or constant surveillance.

Police and psychiatrists had warned that Aswat continues to hold violent extremist views. A 2022 psychiatric assessment noted “the risk of Islamic violent extremism,” and counterterrorism officers assessed him as a risk to national security who could potentially radicalize others.

Aswat was never charged in connection with the July 7, 2005, attacks on London’s transit system, which killed 52 and injured more than 700. British police traced 20 calls from the bombers, in the hours before the attacks, to a phone linked to him. He had met two of the plotters in Pakistan in 2004.

He was convicted in the United States in 2015 for conspiring with radical cleric Abu Hamza to establish an al-Qaeda training camp in Oregon. Aswat pleaded guilty to providing material support to a terrorist organization and received a 20-year sentence, later reduced for time served. He was deported to the U.K. in late 2022 and detained under the Mental Health Act at Broadmoor and later Bethlem hospitals for schizoaffective disorder.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp condemned the release, calling Aswat “a violent Islamist terrorist with serious mental health problems” involved in plots that led to mass murder. “Psychotic Islamist extremists like Aswat are an ongoing danger to the public and should not be released at all,” he told The Telegraph.

A Home Office spokesperson said appropriate measures are in place to manage risk and ensure public safety but declined further comment on the individual case.

The release has reignited debate over Britain’s handling of terrorism-related offenders, mental health detentions and public safety priorities more than two decades after the 7/7 attacks, one of the deadliest terror incidents in modern U.K. history.