His defense was not enough to convince British justice. Ajmal Shahpal, 41, was found guilty in March of incitement to terrorism by a Birmingham court for posting several messages on the social network Twitter encouraging “to commit, prepare or contemplate terrorist acts. He was sentenced to five and a half years in prison on Thursday.
In October 2020, he notably called Samuel Paty’s killer “as brave as the lion” and posted an image of the teacher’s severed head on Twitter, claiming that “the insolent had been sent to hell . During his trial, Ajmal Shahpal claimed that he was simply retweeting other people’s ideas “to gain followers.” »
An “extremist Muslim ideology”
“You have expressed extremist Muslim ideology, including the murder by beheading of anyone deemed to have committed blasphemy against your religion,” Judge Melbourne Inman said in delivering his verdict.
Ajmal Shahpal, from Cashmere, was arrested in March 2021 after writing posts on Twitter in support of a Pakistani political party backing the killing of people accused of blasphemy. Some of his incriminated messages had been posted online in September 2020, the day after a second attack in Paris against the newspaper’s headquarters Charlie Hebdoalready targeted by a deadly attack in 2015.