Sunday 9 November 2014
A married father of two is believed to have become the second British jihadi to have killed himself while fighting in Syria and Iraq.
The man, named in reports as Kabir Ahmed, a 32-year-old from Derby, is believed to have been involved in a suicide bomb attack in the town of Baiji, north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, two days ago.
If the reports are confirmed, it would make Ahmed the second British jihadi suicide bomber.
Abdul Waheed Majeed, a 41-year-old father of three from Crawley, West Sussex, blew himself up when he drove a lorry laden with explosives into a jail in the Syrian city of Aleppo in February.
Going under the name Abu Sumayyah, Ahmed is said not to have told his family that he was leaving Britain to fight for Islamic State. His identity was confirmed by Shiraz Maher, from the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College in London, which monitors social media accounts of alleged jihadis. He said Ahmed originally joined Jund al-Sham in Syria and then moved to Islamic State.
A Foreign Office spokesman said: “We are aware of reports of the death of a British national in Iraq and are looking into them.”
Authorities in Iraq said Ahmed died when he drove a truck into a convoy, killing a top Iraqi police officer, Lt Gen Faisal Malik Zamel, who was inspecting forces in the town, and seven other police officers. The explosion wounded 15 people.
Ahmed was one of three men to be jailed in 2012 for handing out a leaflet calling for gay people to be executed.
Entitled The Death Penalty?, it showed an image of a mannequin hanging from a noose and said: “The death sentence is the only way this immoral crime can be erased from corrupting society and act as a deterrent for any other ill person who is remotely inclined in this bent way.”
At Derby crown court, Ahmed and two co-defendants, Ihjaz Ali and Razwan Javed, were convicted of distributing threatening written material intending to stir up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation, the first prosecution of its kind since legislation came into force in March 2010. Judge John Burgess told the men that their intention was “to do great harm in a peaceful community”.
In July, BBC1’s Panorama broadcast an interview with Ahmed in which the Briton confessed to being a jihadi with Isis fighting in Syria.
He said: “Everybody has got their name on the list [to become a suicide bomber] and everyone is forcing the emir to push their name up. Everyone wants to fight for the sake of Allah.
“If the British government commits terror against our people, is unjust towards our people, kills and murders and rapes our people then you can expect attacks on your soil.
“If you don’t leave our Muslim brothers around the globe, and mind your own business, and support our enemies against us then you can expect these attacks, and so can America and so can any other country.”
Aleem Sheid, who lives in the street where Ahmed’s family reportedly live, said: “It’s a sad day to hear this news, about this young man that has committed this act in Iraq. It makes me feel very upset to hear a young man with a young family has been brainwashed and done this.
“Kabir had kids – they’ll grow up without a family. It’s sad. He was a young guy, he’d play football, go out and do his thing and then sooner or later this has happened.
“He was a nice guy, I socialised with him, we would talk about work, life, that sort of thing. We had certain family issues that were similar, like his mum and dad were separated like mine.
“I went to school with his older brother. But Kabir was a very nice, humble, beautiful lad.
“Nobody’s born bad, it’s people around you that make you behave bad and push you down a certain way.
“It’s hurting me because I feel sorry for the family, and his mum, you know. It’s sad. It’s a very sad day on my street to hear what I heard today. It’s a life and you cannot replace life with anything.
“The million pound question is where did he get radicalised? I don’t know - it’s the people who were around him.”
Another resident, who declined to be named, said: “He was just a normal chilled-out kind of guy.
“But I can honestly say, no disrespect, that he was not the brightest of lads. He was a follower, not a leader. You could ask him to do something and he would do it, he was that sort of guy.
“What I read that he had said about foreign policy, I just thought that must have been a script because he couldn’t speak like that.”
Another 44-year-old Muslim resident, who grew up in the road, said Kabir had gone abroad about 18 months ago.
He said: “I was brought up here, have been to the mosque here and nobody teaches you that sort of stuff. We’re brought up in a country where we appreciate what we’ve been given but some of the Muslims coming in to this country now, they have been brought up totally different.”
He also said Mr Ahmed’s mother and family were “well respected in the community.
Sunday, November 09, 2014
November 10, 2014
The Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation is obtaining all its commercial advertisements through an advertising agency in Kandy owned by the wife of SLBC additional director general Erananda Hettiarachchi alias Baba.
(Reuters) - Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Sunday pressed Russian President Vladimir Putin to play a constructive role in ensuring that a shaky ceasefire in Ukraine holds.