Extremist set to return home despite risk warnings
Haroon Aswat, from Batley, West Yorkshire, was jailed for 20 years in 2015 after he admitted conspiring to set up the camp in the US state of Oregon.
Having served his sentence in the US, the 50-year-old was deported to the UK in 2022 and detained under the Mental Health Act, although a court heard his release was "expected in the relatively near future" after effective treatment.
A judge approved a notification order for Aswat, meaning authorities should be kept up to date with details such as his address.
The hearing at the High Court on 1 April was told Aswat, who is currently being held at Bethlem Royal Hospital, is expected to return to his family in Yorkshire.
He did not serve the entirety of his 20-year sentence because periods of detention in the UK while awaiting extradition were taken into account.
The United States government said the purpose of the training camp was "to train young impressionable men in America to fight and kill so that so they could travel to Afghanistan to join forces with al Qaeda".
Aswat had been working under the direction of radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza to set up the camp.
He has been diagnosed with a mental health condition called schizoaffective disorder, although in 2022 a psychiatrist concluded there was no evidence of him having the condition when the offences took place in or around November 1999.
The psychiatrist said Aswat openly endorsed "extremist ideology" and had told him in an interview: "I am a terrorist."
He wrote in a report ahead of his extradition: "Even when in a relatively stable mental state [Aswat] has continued to express violent extremists Islamic ideology."
According to the psychiatrist, Aswat was "highly ambivalent about the need for medication and had relapsed twice as a result of stopping treatment", which had coincided with violent outbursts.
His report concluded "there remains the risk of Islamic violent extremism".
The High Court hearing was told Aswat has also been assessed by several police officers in the UK, who concluded he "remains a risk to national security".
Sir Robert Jay, who chaired the hearing, said Aswat did not oppose the notification order being made.
According to a Home Office spokesperson, notification orders "allows the police and other authorities to monitor an offender and to manage any ongoing risk they pose".
The spokesperson added: "Protecting the British public is the very first priority of this government, and national security assessments are always carried out on individuals who may pose a risk to the public.
"We have some of the most robust counter-terrorism risk management measures in the world, including a variety of powers for the police and intelligence services to monitor and manage the risk posed by terrorist offenders and individuals of terrorist concern."
Briton jailed for US terror offences
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Los Angeles Times
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New York Post
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The MI9 operative believed anything — even a children's game — could be weaponized. Clutty realized Monopoly sets were manufactured in the same Leeds factory that produced silk maps for airmen. Since the fabric didn't crinkle or tear like paper, it was the perfect material for slipping past Nazi sentries. He teamed up with Norman Watson — head of Britain's Monopoly licensee, Waddingtons — to turn the game into a stealth survival pack. In a secure basement nicknamed 'the Beast,' workers hollowed out game boards and concealed instruments for escape. Abnormal markers, such as an errant red dot on the board's Free Parking corner, signified the package's intended destination and tipped off recipients in the know. Before deployment, Allied airmen were taught to spot doctored sets and wield the items to their advantage. The games arrived packaged with food and other rations sent to prison camps from fictitious humanitarian organizations, addressed to specific POWs trained to coordinate escape efforts and decode instructions from back home, which sometimes incorporated altered playing cards. The first true test of the loaded Monopoly kits came at the infamous German fortress Colditz Castle, a medieval Saxony prison reserved for high-flight-risk Allied captives. British Lt. Airey Neave and Dutch officer Tony Luteyn staged a high-stakes escape in 1941. The two men donned fraudulent uniforms, slipped out through a service shaft, scaled a tall wall and trudged through freezing conditions to flee the facility. Despite dangerous brushes with German authorities via public transit, they crossed Nazi Germany undetected, never looking back until they made it to Switzerland. 'Every British airman who made it home improved the morale of fellow airmen and provided further return on the £10,000 cost of his training — a substantial sum for the time,' Orbanes writes. The success of these escape aids inspired US military officials to adopt similar tactics, launching a Virginia-based intelligence agency called MIS-X in 1942. This organization purchased the classic board game in bulk, dubbing manipulated versions Monopoly X (as opposed to the unaltered Monopoly V, for 'vanilla') and coordinating their delivery to servicemen trapped behind enemy lines. One unidentified escaper, Orbanes notes, likened getaways to actual gameplay, 'avoiding the spaces with houses and hotels . . . until we reached safety.' 4 Fake documents, maps, money and other vital escape items could all be stashed within the hollowed-out Monopoly X game board — which escapees would then destroy to keep the secret safe. Philip E. Orbanes As the first British officer to roll the dice on the rigged Monopoly set and win, Neave joined MI9 to help coordinate similar underground operations across Europe. These networks comprised ordinary civilians risking it all to shuttle soldiers across international borders. Those everyday heroes included bada– women like Benoîte Jean, a French resistance fighter who disarmed men with her alluring looks and kept cooler than Swiss snowbanks when engaging in espionage. The Monopoly mademoiselle (code name: Nori, a reversal of the iron-shaped playing piece) stashed within a lipstick tube sensitive information about a crucial German bombing target. She escorted escaped airmen to Brussels en masse and hid microfilm messages for foreign officials beneath artificial fingernails. On one mission to inform an American intelligence official of traitors in the White House, Jean was intercepted by a major in Hitler's military-police unit who attempted to coerce her into accompanying him to his hotel room for sex. She played along just long enough to gain the upper hand. Then Jean mounted the Gestapo officer and drove his dagger into his neck. 'Tears filled her eyes,' Orbanes writes, recreating the act of self-preservation, 'and her breath came in spasms as he died.' 4 French resistance fighter Benoîte Jean stabbed a German officer with his own dagger. Courtesy of Waldemar van Zedtwitz For all the wartime bravery and ingenuity 'Monopoly X' uncovers, there was also a snake. Enter Harold Cole: a British army deserter loyal only to his own interests. After leading scores of stranded soldiers from Belgium to Marseille, the smooth-talking Cole became a double agent, feeding German intelligence agents information about resistance members and safe houses. 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