Judge Disregards Suspected Terrorist's Monitoring Concerns

'You've Only Got Yourself To Blame'

A young terrorism suspect who says the Government's new security service monitoring powers are preventing him from finding a wife and starting a family has been told by a High Court judge he has only himself to blame.

The British citizen, known as AM and living in northern England, was told he has yet convincingly to demonstrate he has renounced previous views when he was allegedly ready to be a terrorist "martyr".

AM is alleged as a teenager to have been an associate of the foiled 2006 plane bomb plotters, even though he was never arrested.

Now aged 24, he challenged the legality of Home Secretary Theresa May's decision last January to impose wide-ranging restrictions on him under the Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Act.

The measures, referred to as "Tpims", replaced the restrictions previously imposed on him for four-and-a-half years under government control orders.

Dan Squires, appearing for AM, at a recent hearing said he had now been subjected to the longest surveillance period of any terrorism suspect.

Mr Squires argued the "devastating" measures were "disproportionate" and so restrictive that he could not contemplate marriage at an age when all his contemporaries in his community were married, or marrying.

On Friday, Mr Justice Mitting, sitting at the High Court in London, rejected the challenge and ruled the measures - except in one instance - both proportionate and necessary.

The judge said he was prepared to accept the restrictions were having a chilling effect on AM's social life and personal development, but they were "the unavoidable consequence of the situation in which his own activities have placed him".

The Home Secretary was entitled to believe he had been involved in "a viable plot to commit mass murder".

There was a "compelling case" that AM was "willing to martyr himself and to kill large numbers of people in 2006".

The judge added: "But for the disruption of the transatlantic airlines plot, there is every reason to believe that AM would have killed himself and a large number of other people."

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