Family of murdered MP David Amess seeks answers regarding his death

“We have a lot of questions, and somebody needs to answer them,” stated the daughter of Sir David Amess, the Conservative MP who was murdered. Katie Amess informed the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that authorities had not adequately safeguarded her father prior to his death. Ali Harbi Ali is currently serving a whole-life sentence, having been found guilty of fatally stabbing Sir David during a constituency surgery in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, in October 2021. Ms Amess asserted that a comprehensive public inquest into her father’s passing was necessary, citing that there are “so many people that are at fault here”. She mentioned that her brother had received a phone call the evening before the assault, indicating that Sir David, who represented Southend West as an MP, was going to be killed. Nevertheless, a coroner’s report concluded that this phone call posed no threat to the MP’s life and that law enforcement had responded appropriately. Essex Police confirmed they investigated the call, stating it was not connected to Sir David’s murder “in any way”. The force also reported the arrest of a woman in her 20s and a man in his 30s, both from Southend. However, Ms Amess contended that officers “should have gone” to Sir David’s constituency surgery the subsequent day, suggesting that a police presence might have deterred Ali. She elaborated, “The guy that killed my father admitted that he had gone to another surgery and other people’s houses to kill them and when he saw a police presence he obviously didn’t go through with the attack.” “If they [police] were there, my dad probably wouldn’t be dead.” She called for a “full investigation into why they didn’t show up”. In a statement, Essex Police clarified that it does not routinely assign officers to police MP constituency surgeries. The statement added, “If information or intelligence comes to light to give us cause for concern of the safety of an MP we would of course advise and guide them to keep them safe and provide a policing presence where necessary.” During Ali’s trial in 2022, it was revealed that he had been referred to Prevent, the government’s counter-extremism programme, in 2014 and 2015 when he was a teenager. Ms Amess claimed she had been informed that authorities had “missed follow-up meetings with him” during this period, which allowed him to “disappear out of the system”. She remarked, “Had we done the proper monitoring through this Prevent scheme, we could have stopped this. And it’s not just failed my family, it’s failing other members of the public and it’s failing other members of Parliament.” The Home Office stated: “The attack on Sir David Amess was an awful tragedy, the safety of members of Parliament is paramount and significant work has been taken forward in response to his tragic killing.” It further described the Prevent scheme as a “vital tool to stop people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism”. Coroner Lincoln Brookes decided in July against resuming Sir David’s inquest, which had been adjourned after Ali was charged with murder. He noted a considerable time gap between Prevent’s intervention and Sir David’s murder, stating there was “no evidential basis to consider this attack was possibly preventable so many years and imponderables later.” Ms Amess labelled the decision “ridiculous”, arguing that the scheme was intended to “track down terrorists and stop them before they carry out their attack”. She added, “There’s so many people that are at fault here, and nobody is being given any answers, because I’m not being allowed a full public, open inquest, so that we can learn from our mistakes and make sure this doesn’t happen again.” High Court documents indicate that Ms Amess, an actress residing in California, initiated a personal injury claim against the Home Office and Essex Police in December. However, she informed the BBC: “I can’t actually do the civil claim, because that would cost, like, hundreds of thousands of pounds that obviously I don’t have. “So my only hope was to do this inquest, and that has been taken from me.” Essex Police acknowledged awareness of a claim form filed at court but stated that “as these papers have not been served on our force, we are unable to comment any further upon them”. The force also described Sir David as a “heroic public servant” and recounted that “in the immediate aftermath of his murder, two of our heroic unarmed officers ran into the face of danger, trying desperately to save him and of course detaining his killer.“Several other of our officers attended shortly afterwards and worked with paramedic colleagues to help save Sir David, sadly they were unable to do this.” Ms Amess also paid tribute to her father, calling him “the most hardest-working person I’ve ever met”, and characterised him as someone who enjoyed helping others, being “full of life and enigmatic and passionate”. She expressed that it was now “so hard” for her to be in Southend “because it just reminds me of my father”. She concluded, “I just wish that he was here to see all of this and to see Southend as a city.”