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| - An inquest jury on Friday condemned official failings that allowed a convicted terrorist to kill two people in a central London knife attack nearly two years ago. Usman Khan, 28, stabbed to death Saskia Jones, 23, and Jack Merritt, 25, while attending a prisoner rehabilitation programme at Fishmongers' Hall, in November 2019. Delegates from the conference, including one armed with a narwhal tusk and another with a fire extinguisher, fought off the assailant, forcing him outside on to nearby London Bridge. Khan, who was wearing a fake suicide vest, was then shot dead by armed police. The jury at a coroner's inquest into the deaths of Jones and Merritt -- both University of Cambridge graduates working on the programme -- ruled they had been "unlawfully killed". They criticised official agencies involved in managing Khan, including the police and probation service, pointing to "missed opportunities for those with expertise and experience to give guidance". The event organisers were duped by the attacker's "poster-boy" image within the rehabilitation programme, they said. There had also been a "failure to complete event-specific risk assessment by any party" and forge a coherent approach to reduce risk. The attack -- one of a spate in recent years in the British capital -- took place only 11 months after Khan had been released from prison under strict conditions. He was also under investigation by counter-terror police and the domestic intelligence service MI5. Merritt's father, David, said Khan should have been more closely monitored, pointing to his previous record and a psychologist's evaluation that he was still a high risk. "With all that information, you would have thought that the authorities would have put in place a system to monitor and manage him effectively and keep the public safe, and they failed to do that," Merritt told the BBC. Jones' uncle, Philip Jones, said her family was "particularly concerned" about the lax safety measures at the event, and how Khan was allowed to go to London unaccompanied. The UK's most senior counter-terrorism officer, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu, said he was "deeply sorry" for the omissions and failures. He said it was "simply unacceptable" and maintained that since the attack, systems for managing violent offenders had been "significantly strengthened". Khan had been convicted in 2012 for being part of an al-Qaeda-inspired plot to set up a terror camp in Pakistan and bomb the London Stock Exchange. The inquest was told that he was "manipulative and duplicitous". He was released under electronic surveillance in December 2018 after serving less than seven years of a 16-year prison sentence. British interior minister Priti Patel noted that the government had now ended automatic early releases and strengthened supervision for terror offenders. "It is important that the government and operational partners learn lessons to prevent further incidents like this, and we will also consider the inquest findings," she said. "I will always do everything in my power to keep the British people safe." bur-jit/jj
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