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‘They turn convicted criminals into extremists’: How Islamist gangs are taking over Britain’s jails

Groups of Muslim inmates use violence and intimidation to ‘overrun’ high-security facilities, leaving authorities powerless to stop them

 

Crouching on a wall by the sea, in T-shirt, shorts and trainers, a man in his twenties with neatly trimmed dark hair and a bottle in his hand beams at the camera. The sky is blue and the waters are calm. He looks relaxed and content. The reality, though, couldn’t have been more different.

The young man grinning in the sun was Baz Hockton – a troubled and dangerous individual with a string of convictions. Not long after his seaside trip, he was jailed for stabbing two men with a knife.

Then, while in custody, he converted to Islam – and carried out the first terrorist attack within the walls of a British prison, at the high security Whitemoor jail, in Cambridgeshire.

The events of that day, in January 2020, when Hockton and terrorist plotter Brusthom Ziamani strapped on fake suicide belts, armed themselves with makeshift metallic weapons and tried to murder a prison officer, represented a huge wake-up call for the authorities about the threat posed by Islamist extremists in jail.

But, in some quarters at least, not enough appears to have been done to counter it.

And on Saturday, the sense of peril came to the fore once again when Hashem Abedi, one of the Islamist terrorists behind the Manchester Arena bombing allegedly attacked three prison officers with makeshift weapons and hot cooking oil at HMP Frankland in County Durham. Two officers were left with life-threatening injuries as a result of the rampage.

The incident came just days after reports that, Frankland, a high security prison where Abedi is serving life for 22 murders in the Manchester Arena bombing, has become “overrun” with Islamist gangs who have threatened to attack or kill other prisoners if they don’t join up.

HMP Frankland is by no means an isolated case.

Former inmates have spoken about a war in a number of prisons between Islamist gangs and rival groups involving acts of grotesque violence. The skirmishes are not as frequent now, but it’s not because authorities have seized back control. Instead it is said to be because the Islamist gangs have won the power battle, leading some to convert to their side and leaving others who will not increasingly fearful for their safety.

“It’s a real problem, very complex and it won’t go away anytime soon,” says Steve Gillan, general secretary of the Prison Officers’ Association (POA).

“Some prisoners are intimidated into joining a gang. Others do it for protection, because there’s safety in numbers, or they think there’s a status to be in a Muslim gang – they think they’ll be treated better, always allowed to go to prayers on a Friday [for example], and have better food in the evenings at Ramadan.

Gangs have been a feature of prison life ever since there were prisons, but their nature and composition have changed over the past 20 years as the mix of offenders has altered.

After a surge of law enforcement activity in the UK in the early 2000s, following the September 11 attacks in the United States and the July 7 bombings in London, the number of Islamist extremists in custody for terror-related offences increased sharply.

By 2017, a year which featured four Islamist-inspired attacks in London and Manchester, there were 185 Muslims in jail for terrorism offences; the number has dipped only slightly since then, with at least 157 at the last count, in September – 62 per cent of the total number of terrorist inmates.

The threat from this influx of Islamist terrorist offenders was identified by former prison governor Ian Acheson, whose government-commissioned report led to the construction of ‘separation centres’ in three jails to hold the most subversive extremist prisoners.

“What we saw were environments where all the ingredients for radicalisation were there,” he told the House of Commons Justice Committee almost a decade ago. “A number of high-profile Islamist extremists and terrorists in prison are actively proselytising the Islamist ideology and have the capacity to do so around other prisoners who would be susceptible and vulnerable to that ideology,” Acheson added.

Inmates saw it for themselves. At the time, Ryan* had just been sentenced for drugs offences and was moved from HMP Wandsworth, south-west London, where there were rivalries between black and white prisoners and gangs from different postcodes, to Belmarsh, south-east London, a high security jail renowned for its large population of terrorism offenders.

Ryan says those offenders acted as a magnet to many of the Muslim prisoners at Belmarsh, who make up almost a-third of the prison’s population. “The terrorist prisoners were the ones that everyone wanted to congregate around,” he says.

“A lot of people will look up at them, they look at them as a second prophet, as a God. In Belmarsh, they put them in with normal prisoners – guys convicted of drug offences, GBH, alongside a terrorist – this is where the issue stems from.

“A new guy comes in, and over the space of six months or a year, they’ve befriended him – these guys turn from convicted criminals into extremists,” Ryan adds.

The increase in Islamist terrorist prisoners came at the same time as a rise in the overall number of Muslims in jails across England and Wales – 99 per cent of whom are being held for non-terror offences.

The number has nearly trebled, from 5,500 in 2002 to almost 16,000 in 2024, and now represents 18 per cent of the prison population, compared with 8 per cent two decades ago. Muslims are disproportionately represented in custody, though the number in the general population has risen as well, from just under 3 per cent in 2001 to 6.5 per cent in 2021.

It is hardly a surprise, therefore, that in the confines of a prison where many offenders struggle to cope, Muslims have formed ‘friendship groups’ to get by. A Ministry of Justice report in 2019 said the groups, referred to by staff and inmates as the ‘Muslim brotherhood’, had many ‘benefits’, including companionship, support and religious familiarity.

But the study – which drew on research in three high-security jails – pointed out that some prisoners in the groups appeared to operate as a gang ‘under the guise of religion’.

“The gang had clearly defined membership roles including leaders, recruiters, enforcers, followers and foot-soldiers. Violence, bullying and intimidation were prevalent… the gang was perceived to be responsible for the circulation of the majority of the contraband goods in the establishments,” the report said.

Gary*, who served a long sentence at a number of jails across the country, says Islamist gangs have now established a “foothold” in the six ‘Category A’, high-security prisons, as well as several others.

“They are feared. They pretty much run the prisons,” he says. “A lot of them have merged with drug gangs – being able to sell drugs and accumulate wealth is a very powerful thing in the prison system.”

Gary describes how some prisoners are pressured into joining Islamist gangs while others, who are prepared to convert, are welcomed in – even those, in the hierarchy of criminals, considered to be the lowest of the low: sex offenders.

“In Islam, if you convert, all your previous sins are washed away. The Muslim gangs stood by that principle for people in for sex offences. It fractured the culture of the prison system. I was there watching it for years on end, it was obvious it was going to turn into a big problem,” he says.

In 2022, a disturbing report by Jonathan Hall KC, the reviewer of anti-terrorism legislation, found that faith-based self-segregation by prisoners had provided a “fertile base for violent Islamist activity” in which attacks on non-Muslim inmates, staff and the public were “encouraged”.

The report said charismatic or violent prisoners acted as “self-styled emirs” to radicalise the wider Muslim prison population, exerting control through a network of “enforcers” over access to prayer meetings, the prison kitchens and showers. In some cases, Sharia courts had been set up in jails to rule on matters of Islamic law, delivering punishments such as flogging.

Hall said the prison authorities had “underappreciated” the impact of Islamist groups for too long, partly due to a tendency to regard Islam as a “no-go area”. Gillan, whose union represents over 30,000 prison officers and other staff, agrees: “A lot of staff backed off because they were frightened of being accused of racism. They were a wee bit cautious about identifying individuals for fear of reprisals,” though he says officers are now more confident to call it out, thanks to greater awareness of the problem, improved training and more intelligence sharing.

In some respects, dealing with Islamist extremist gangs appears to have become a routine part of offender management, to the extent that it barely gets mentioned in prison inspection reports. The only recent critical reference is contained in last year’s review of Manchester Prison, where the government was ordered to make urgent improvements because of the widespread availability of drugs and weapons.

The report said: “Leaders did not provide appropriate training on the dangers of radicalisation and extremism. Prisoners did not receive guidance on how to spot the signs of radicalisation in themselves or others.”

“When it first happened we were a bit inept,” says Mark Icke, vice-president of the Prison Governors’ Association, who has worked in jails for 27 years. “We’ve just become very good at managing these situations and these people and it’s part of core business, so much so that other countries come to the UK to see what we do.”

Others are less convinced. One prison security expert, who doesn’t want to be named, says senior officials have a tendency to smooth over difficulties, particularly when people on the outside draw attention to them. “Prison service culture is incredibly defensive and introspective,” he says.

The latest example came last month after a lawyer visiting clients at HMP Frankland – which houses some of the most dangerous inmates in the country and possesses one of the country’s three separation centres – claimed prisoners had been placed in segregation for their own protection after standing up to Islamist gangs.

The Prison Service dismissed the suggestion as “completely untrue”, even though it’s common practice to use segregation cells for prisoners whose safety is at risk.

After all, the far-Right activist Tommy Robinson has been held in isolation for five months at Woodhill Prison, in Milton Keynes, after death threats were made against him.

A more likely explanation is that prison managers and the MoJ understandably do not want to fan the flames of anti-Muslim sentiment, so they play down reports of the growing influence of Islamist gangs.

“Extremism is a problem – Muslim or far-Right, it has created clashes, and if it wasn’t for the professionalism of officers it would be worse,” says Gillan. “I think we’ve got a grip but we don’t take it for granted,” he adds, pointing out that a chronic shortage of prison places across the country is hampering attempts to move troublesome prisoners and keep gangs apart.

Had prison staff separated the dangerous Islamist terrorist Ziamani, who is believed to have a history of radicalising fellow inmates, from Hockton, they may have been able to forestall the near-fatal terror attack the pair launched in Whitemoor jail.

It’s clear the lessons from that chilling incident five years ago are just as relevant for the prison authorities today as they were then.

Five years on, in the aftermath of the attacks allegedly carried out be Abedi, questions over the management of high-risk inmates are back in the spotlight once more.

“Frankland was on a trajectory here to a serious terrorist incident,” Acheson said on Saturday. “The complacency of the prison service in relation to terrorism is well known. Now we are seeing the fruits of that.”

*Names changed to protect anonymity

 

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