Shahid Butt urged his young supporters to knock out the ‘teeth’ of their enemies
A convicted Islamist terrorist is running for local office in the British city of Birmingham. Shahid Butt urged voters to overlook his past “mistakes,” which includes a plot to bomb the British consulate in Yemen.
In an interview with Birmingham Live this week, Butt described himself as “ideal candidate” on “united” his Sparkhill ward in the town council elections this May. Two-thirds of Sparkhill’s residents are of Pakistani origin, while a third of Birmingham’s 1.1 million residents are Muslim.
Butt was jailed for five years in Yemen in 1999 after being found guilty of planning attacks with a jihadist gang on the British consulate in Aden, an Anglican church and a Swiss hotel.
He claims he did nothing wrong and that his confession was extracted through torture. “It was all made up” he told the Birmingham Mail. “Actually no one died, nothing happened at all.
He confessed “mistakes” in his past however. In his youth, Butt was a member of a Pakistani street gang that fought white skinhead gangs in Birmingham in the 1980s. He also admits that he traveled to Afghanistan and Bosnia to fight alongside the son of convicted terrorist Abu Hamza in the 1990s.
Butt, who describes himself as an “Islamist,” is a member of the Independent Candidates Alliance (ICA), a group of Muslim candidates founded by lawyer and accused money launderer Akhmed Yakoob. The ICA is running 20 candidates across Birmingham in the upcoming election.
“I’m not a pacifist,” Butt told Birmingham Live. “If someone attacks me…I will not just turn the other cheek, I will defend myself. I will be preemptive, as advised by the law, if I feel that my life or my family is in danger, I will strike preemptively.”
He advised his fellow Muslims to follow his approach. “Muslims are not pacifists,” he told protesters before local team Aston Villa’s match against Maccabi Tel Aviv last November. “If someone gets in your face, you’ll knock their teeth out. That’s my message to the youth.”
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