Terror trial jury told tweet ‘encouraging terrorism’ was bid to gain followers
A Twitter user accused of encouraging others to decapitate anyone who insulted Islam has told a jury he retweeted praise for a terrorist “just to have some more followers”.
Ajmal Shahpal told Birmingham Crown Court he did not believe that the killer of French school teacher Samuel Paty was “as brave as a lion” or that the victim “deserved to be killed” in France in October 2020.
Prosecutors allege Shahpal, of Birkin Avenue, Radford, Nottingham, encouraged others to commit, prepare, or instigate acts of terrorism in a series of retweets, including one containing an image of Mr Paty’s severed head.
Shahpal, 41, is also alleged to have tweeted messages backing a Pakistan-based political party which supported the “out-of-hand murder of those who it thinks have committed blasphemy”.
Under cross-examination from prosecutor Dan Pawson-Pounds on Monday, Shahpal, who is originally from Pakistan and was assisted by an Urdu interpreter, denied pretending to have a poor understanding of English to try to escape responsibility for his tweets.
Mr Pawson-Pounds told Shahpal, who passed a taxi exam and studied for a diploma in English and business management after coming to the UK in 2009: “The Crown suggests that you were a radicalised follower of extreme Islam and that you both supported and encouraged the murder of people for what you considered to be blasphemy.
“You used your Twitter account to encourage people to do this by saying on that account repeatedly that blasphemers should be killed and should be killed immediately.”
After the defendant accepted that Mr Paty did not deserve to die and that the teacher’s killer was not “as brave as a lion” – contradicting statements in one of his retweets – Mr Pawson-Round asked him: “Why did you retweet a tweet saying all these things then?”
Shahpal responded: “As I have already told you, the reason behind this was just to have some more followers.
“At the time when I retweeted it, that picture (of a severed head) wasn’t fully open at that time on the feed of Twitter.
“So at the time I did not know what picture it was that I was retweeting.”
Claiming he had only read the first line of the message before retweeting it, Shahpal added: “I did not fully read it.
“What I have read, it did not say that his chopped off head was lying on the floor.
“A friend of mine who set up this account for me, he told me that if you do this, you are going to get more followers.”
Questioned about a further tweet which called for rapists to be stoned to death, Shahpal said it did not accord with his beliefs and he had “just copied and pasted” a message written in English “because the issue was ongoing” in Pakistan.
After Shahpal denied that he had intended to encourage terrorism, he was asked if he had realised there would be a risk that his tweets would encourage acts of terror.
Shahpal answered: “I was just posting them (tweets). I didn’t have a clue.”
Later in his evidence, asked about a tweet containing a call for someone to be “killed immediately”, Shahpal added: “My English is not that good. I just copied and pasted.”
The defendant denies two counts of encouraging others to commit, prepare, or instigate acts of terrorism, and two alternative charges of the same offence being reckless as to whether such acts would be encouraged.
The trial continues.
The post Terror trial jury told tweet ‘encouraging terrorism’ was bid to gain followers appeared first on Faith Matters.
Categories: Ajmal Shahpal, Birmingham, Pakistan, Samuel Paty, terrorism, Urdu
'We in Tell MAMA are greatly concerned about Twitter's direction. We know that many who worked on issues such as online safety and safeguarding have lost their jobs. Nevertheless, we will always advocate for the safety of communities on this platform.' 
Former Malaysia PM Mahathir refuses to apologise for France attack comments
Former Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohamad defends his widely condemned comments on attacks by Muslim extremists in France, saying that they were taken out of context as he criticised Twitter and Facebook for removing his posts.
The 95-year-old sparked widespread outrage when he wrote on his blog on Thursday that “Muslims have a right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past”.
Twitter removed a tweet from Mr Mahathir containing the remark, which it said glorified violence, while France’s digital minister demanded the company also ban Mr Mahathir from its platform.
“I am indeed disgusted with attempts to misrepresent and take out of context what I wrote on my blog,” Mr Mahathir said in a statement.
He said critics failed to read his posting in full, especially the next sentence which read: “But by and large Muslims have not applied the ‘eye for an eye’ law. Muslims don’t. The French shouldn’t. Instead the French should teach their people to respect other people’s feelings.”
He said Twitter and Facebook removed the posting despite his explanation, and slammed the move as hypocritical.
“On the one hand, they defended those who chose to display offending caricatures of Prophet Mohammed … and expect all Muslims to swallow it in the name of freedom of speech and expression,” he said.
“On the other, they deleted deliberately that Muslims had never sought revenge for the injustice against them in the past”, thereby stirring French hatred for Muslims, he added.
On Twitter, however, that sentence was not deleted. A staff member for Mr Mahathir said the entire posting was removed by Facebook.
Facebook Malaysia said in an email that it removed Mr Mahathir’s posting for violating its policies, adding: “We do not allow hate speech on Facebook and strongly condemn any support for violence, death or physical harm.”
The comments by the two-time prime minister were in response to calls by Muslim nations to boycott French products after French leader Emmanuel Macron described Islam as a religion “in crisis” and vowed to crack down on radicalism following the murder of a French teacher who showed his class a cartoon depicting the prophet of Islam.
His remarks also came as a Tunisian man killed three people at a church in the southern French city of Nice.
The US ambassador to Malaysia, Kamala Shirin Lakhdir, said on Friday that she “strongly disagreed” with Mr Mahathir’s statement, adding in a statement: “Freedom of expression is a right, calling for violence is not.”
Mr Mahathir has been viewed as an advocate of moderate Islamic views and a spokesman for the interests of developing countries.
At the same time, he has pointedly criticised Western society and nations as well as their relationships to the Muslim world, while he has been denounced in Israel and elsewhere for making anti-Semitic remarks.
The post Former Malaysia PM Mahathir refuses to apologise for France attack comments appeared first on Faith Matters.
Categories: Emmanuel Macron, France comments, Malaysia Pm Mahathir, News, Nice