A British man was sentenced to life in prison on Friday over a plot to kill Prime Minister Theresa May by first detonating an explosive device to get into her Downing Street office and then using a knife or a gun to attack her.

Naa’imur Rahman, 21, of north London, planned to detonate an improvised explosive device at the heavily guarded gates of Downing Street and gain access to May’s office in the ensuing chaos and assassinate her, according to police.

He was convicted last month of preparing to commit acts of terrorism and at London’s Old Bailey court on Friday was given a life prison and will serve 30 years behind bars.

“Rahman’s target was the prime minister but he had no qualms about killing innocent bystanders in the process of reaching her,” said Dean Haydon, the UK’s Senior National Coordinator for Counter Terrorism.

“At one point he told a covert counter terrorism officer that even if he could not reach the Prime Minister, he just wanted to strike fear into people.”

As he put the plot together, Rahman believed he was corresponding online with members of the Islamic State (IS) militant group. However, he was actually talking to undercover officers from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Britain’s MI5 domestic spy agency.

He was arrested last November shortly after unwittingly meeting an undercover police officer and collecting what he believed was a homemade bomb but was in fact a harmless replica.

After his conviction in July, police said Rahman had been in contact with an uncle who had travelled to Syria and joined IS and who had encouraged his nephew to carry out attacks in Britain.

Rahman had been planning to carry out the attack for two years but his resolve was hardened when he heard that his uncle had been killed in a drone attack.

Britain is on its second highest threat level with an attack considered highly likely. Last year, there were four deadly attacks and the head of MI5 said in May that a further 12 Islamist plots had been foiled since the first of these in March 2017.

Earlier this month, a man was charged with attempted murder after a car careered into people and a barrier at London’s parliament, with police saying the incident was being treated as an act of terrorism.

A Vietnamese court found two Vietnamese-Americans guilty of terrorism on Wednesday and sentenced them to 14 years in prison for masterminding a series of bomb plots earlier this year, a court official told Reuters.

James Nguyen and Angel Phan were convicted, along with 10 accomplices who received short jail terms, after a two day trial. All defendants had been charged with “attempting to overthrow the state”.

Phan and Nguyen had been accused of organising at least three attacks, including the attempted bombing of Vietnam’s largest international airport in Ho Chi Minh City last April, and the successful bombing of a police station in June this year.

“The remaining 10 defendants in the same trial received prison terms of between five and 11 years,” an official at the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Court told Reuters by phone.

According to state media, Phan and Nguyen were acting on behalf of the “Provisional Government of Vietnam”, a California-based organisation run by Vietnamese-Americans still loyal to the now defunct state of South Vietnam.

The U.S. organisation, which was listed as a “terrorist” group by Hanoi in January this year, dispatched Phan and Nguyen to Vietnam in February 2017 to carry out attacks on Vietnamese national holidays, the Ministry of Public Security said in a statement on its website.

Phan and Nguyen ran a network of underground operatives in Vietnam, some of whom were given titles in a shadow government such as “governor of Saigon”, or “commander of national defence guards,” the Ministry of Public Security said on Wednesday.

The pair assigned “counter-revolutionary” missions to the group’s members in Vietnam, the ministry said, including a plan to broadcast anti-government propaganda from local radio stations, organise protests, and “insult the image” of former president Ho Chi Minh.

Phan and Nguyen will be deported after serving their jail term, Voice of Vietnam radio reported.

In June, a court in Ho Chi Minh City upheld prison sentences against 15 members of the group it said were guilty of planting bombs in the international terminal of Tan Son Nhat airport in April last year.

Last month, police said it had arrested seven people from the group over the bombing of a Ho Chi Minh City police station.

The incident, in which two small explosive devices were detonated, injured three people in what police said was a “terrorist case against the people’s government”.

A police warehouse, where confiscated vehicles, mostly motorbikes, were stored, was also blown up.

The Provisional Government of Vietnam did not respond to a request for comment made via its website.

In a statement, the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi said it had been providing consular services for James Nguyen.

“We will continue to monitor Mr. Nguyen’s welfare, advocate for him, and provide consular services until his release,” spokesman Pope Thrower said in the statement, which did not mention Angel Phan or address the terrorism charges.

A 29-year-old man detained over a suspected terrorist attack outside parliament has been further arrested for attempted murder, police said on Wednesday.

He had initially been arrested on suspicion of terrorism offences after he appeared deliberately to drive his car at cyclists and pedestrians before ramming it into barriers outside the parliament building on Tuesday morning.

Police confirmed media reports that the man is a UK national originally from Sudan. He has been named by a security source as Salih Khater.

“We are satisfied that we know the identity of the arrested man,” police said in a statement. “The priority of the investigation team continues to be to understand the motivation behind this incident.”

Militants behind an attack on Jordanian police supported Islamic State and investigations had revealed plans for more attacks on security and civilian targets, Jordan’s interior minister said on Monday.

Jordanian police said on Saturday a homemade explosive device planted near a police van killed a policeman and injured six others the day before.

The police vehicle had been maintaining security near a music festival in the majority Christian town of Fuhais, near the capital Amman and 15 kilometres (about 10 miles) from the hillside city of Salt.

In a huge security operation, Jordanian forces laid siege to a building in a residential part of Salt on Saturday night in search of those responsible for the bomb attack.

After the suspected militants refused to heed calls to surrender, the security forces stormed the building in a shoot out that resulted in the death of three militants and four security personnel, police said.

Ten members of the security forces were also injured.

Interior Minister Sameer al-Mobaideen said the militants, who blew up part of the building when the security forces stormed it, did not belong to a specific group but subscribed to Islamic State ideology.

Militants from Islamic State and other radical jihadist groups have long targeted U.S.-allied Jordan and dozens of militants are serving long prison terms.

“There were plots to wage a series of terror attacks that sought security points and popular gatherings. We know the targets but we won’t tell them so people won’t get terrified,” Mobaideen said.

King Abdullah, a Middle East ally of Western powers against Islamist militancy who has also safeguarded Jordan’s peace treaty with Israel, warned on Saturday the perpetrators of the attack would pay dearly.

SECRET INVESTIGATIONS

The monarch has been among the most vocal leaders in the region in warning of threats posed by radical groups.

The group were all Jordanian and there were no signs so far they had foreign links, Mobaideen said, refusing to give names of suspects. “The investigations are secret and ongoing,” he told a news conference

Alongside automatic weapons in the suspect’s possession, the authorities found a location where chemical ingredients for manufacturing explosives were buried, Mobaideen added.

General Hussein Hawatmeh, head of Jordan’ Gendarmerie, said the militant cell was recently set up and there were indications its members had embraced radical ideology.

“What is dangerous is that these new recruits are more impulsive than those with experience in executing operations that harm Jordan’s security,” Hawatmeh told reporters.

Jordan has been relatively unscathed by the uprisings, civil wars and Islamist militancy that have swept the Middle East since 2011.

But there have been some incidents of Islamist violence, increasingly carried out by members of powerful tribes that are traditionally the backbone of support for the ruling Hashemite dynasty.

Security forces have been extra vigilant having warned that sympathisers of Islamic State could launch revenge attacks after militants were driven out of most of the territory they once controlled in Syria and Iraq.

Intelligence officials and some experts believe widening social disparities and a perception of official corruption are fuelling a rise in radicalisation among disaffected youths in a country with high unemployment and growing poverty.

Turkey will retaliate against a U.S. decision to impose sanctions on two senior ministers over the imprisonment of Pastor Andrew Brunson, the foreign ministry said on Wednesday.

Washington sanctioned Justice Minister Abdulhamit Gul and Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu over the pastor’s detention. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said the two men played leading roles in his 2016 arrest and later detention.

“We call on the U.S. administration to walk back from this wrong decision,” a statement by the Turkish foreign ministry said, calling Washington’s action a “hostile stance”.

An Israeli court jailed an Israeli Arab poet for five months on Tuesday after convicting her of incitement to terrorism for a poem and remarks she posted on social media during a wave of Palestinian street attacks.

Dareen Tatour, 36, posted on Facebook and YouTube a video of herself reading out her poem “Resist, My People, Resist”, as a soundtrack to footage of masked Palestinian youths throwing stones and firebombs at Israeli soldiers.

Tatour published her poem in October 2015 during a spate of deadly Palestinian stabbing, shooting and ramming attacks on Israelis. She was arrested a few days later, and prosecutors said her post was a call for violence. She denied this.

Her case became a cause celebre for freedom of speech advocates in Israel and abroad. It drew attention to the advanced technology used by Israeli security agencies to trawl through social media to identify and arrest users suspected of incitement to violence, or of planning attacks.

Tatour said her poem was misunderstood by the Israeli authorities as it was not a call for violence, rather for non-violent struggle.

U.S.-backed negotiations on a Palestinian state in territory Israel captured in a 1967 war have been stalled since 2014.

Tatour was also charged with supporting a terrorist group. Prosecutors said she had expressed support for the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad’s call for an uprising.

“I wasn’t expecting justice to be done. The case was political from the start, because I am Palestinian and support freedom of speech,” she told reporters at the Nazareth Magistrate’s Court in northern Israel.

ARAB MINORITY

Tatour belongs to Israel’s Arab minority, which comprises mainly descendants of the Palestinians who remained on their land after the 1948 Arab-Jewish war that surrounded the creation of the state of Israel. Hundreds of thousands fled or were driven from their homes.

The court added a six-month suspended sentence to Tatour’s jail time, according to the official minutes distributed by the Justice Ministry. Her lawyer, Gaby Lasky, said Tatour would appeal both the verdict and the sentence.

Israel says the string of Palestinian attacks that began in 2015 was fuelled by online incitement and it has launched a legal crackdown to curb it.

Indictments for online incitement have tripled in Israel since 2014. Prosecutions by the Israeli military have also increased in the occupied West Bank – most of those charged are young Palestinians.

The campaign against alleged incitement has raised questions about the balance between security and free speech.

On July 18 the Israeli parliament was set to pass legislation that would have empowered the justice system to order Internet providers, such as Facebook and Google, to take down social media posts in Israel deemed as incitement.

But hours before the scheduled vote Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shelved the bill. An adviser to Netanyahu, Jonatan Urich, said the law was open to a too-wide interpretation that could allow cyber-censorship and harm freedom of speech.

The Daily Star on Sunday must print a clarification that its investigation into UK mosques raising funds for terrorism was significantly misleading.

A journalist for the newspaper had posed as a man wanting to transfer money abroad “with the help of a group of Bradford-based Isis sympathisers”. The original print headline published on November 22, 2015 read “UK mosques give cash for terror”. The online edition had used the headline “UK mosques fundraising for terror”.

Miqdaad Versi’s complaint to IPSO on grounds of accuracy (Clause 1) was upheld on April 4. The committee ruled that both headlines did not expose serious, organised wrongdoing when the money was collected by a few individuals.

The Daily Star on Sunday has offered to publish a clarification in a forthcoming edition on page 2. It reads: “The headline of an article, published on 22 November 2015, stated ‘UK mosques give cash for terror’. We would like to clarify that the headline was based on the claims of radical Isa Amriki that funding for terrorism came from collections at mosques, not by or on behalf of UK mosques, which were not involved in any way.”

It also offered to amend the online headline and publish a clarification as a footnote. The newspaper, however, rejected Mr Versi’s offer of writing a positive story about Muslims and to work with him in the future to avoid such inaccuracies. And so Mr Versi then requested that the Committee adjudicate on the matter.

The original online headline

The amended online headline

The original article had received thousands of social media shares. Tommy Robinson, the founder and ex-leader of the English Defence League (EDL), now of Pegida UK, tweeted it.

The hooligan-linked EDL splinter the Pie and Mash squad wrote “I’m shocked by this. Not” after sharing the link on their Facebook on January 4.

Whether the amended article will generate the same level of social media shares remains to be seen.

The post Daily Star on Sunday amends misleading story on UK mosques appeared first on TELL MAMA.

The Daily Star on Sunday must print a clarification that its investigation into UK mosques raising funds for terrorism was significantly misleading.

A journalist for the newspaper had posed as a man wanting to transfer money abroad “with the help of a group of Bradford-based Isis sympathisers”. The original print headline published on November 22, 2015 read “UK mosques give cash for terror”. The online edition had used the headline “UK mosques fundraising for terror”.

Miqdaad Versi’s complaint to IPSO on grounds of accuracy (Clause 1) was upheld on April 4. The committee ruled that both headlines did not expose serious, organised wrongdoing when the money was collected by a few individuals.

The Daily Star on Sunday has offered to publish a clarification in a forthcoming edition on page 2. It reads: “The headline of an article, published on 22 November 2015, stated ‘UK mosques give cash for terror’. We would like to clarify that the headline was based on the claims of radical Isa Amriki that funding for terrorism came from collections at mosques, not by or on behalf of UK mosques, which were not involved in any way.”

It also offered to amend the online headline and publish a clarification as a footnote. The newspaper, however, rejected Mr Versi’s offer of writing a positive story about Muslims and to work with him in the future to avoid such inaccuracies. And so Mr Versi then requested that the Committee adjudicate on the matter.

The original online headline

The amended online headline

The original article had received thousands of social media shares. Tommy Robinson, the founder and ex-leader of the English Defence League (EDL), now of Pegida UK, tweeted it.

The hooligan-linked EDL splinter the Pie and Mash squad wrote “I’m shocked by this. Not” after sharing the link on their Facebook on January 4.

Whether the amended article will generate the same level of social media shares remains to be seen.

The post Daily Star on Sunday amends misleading story on UK mosques appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Protesters gathered at a popular beach in Mogadishu to condemn al-Shabab.

Less than a week ago, militants from the group had murdered twenty people at a restaurant in Lido beach.

The demonstration attracted hundreds to the same beach in solidarity with the dead. Some used the hashtag #LiidoDemonstration to promote the protest.

Hundreds of Somalis have gathered at the scene of an attack on a local beach Liido to demonstrate against #AlShabaab pic.twitter.com/pAcmBln6Tz

— Farhan Jimale (@farhanjimale) January 28, 2016

#LiidoDemonstration in support of victims that lost their lives in #Alshabab attack last week. pic.twitter.com/jo0TrkjjkV

— Omar H. Ibrahim (@MrOmarHaji) January 28, 2016

Others joined the conversation to highlight broad disdain for Al-Shabab inside Somalia. And praise those attending the protest. Others chanted that al-Shabab has ‘no religion’.

#LiidoDemonstration = act of bravery from people daring to defy & differ from terrorists trying to hold their city hostage. #Somalia

— A A Mohamoud (@AliMohamoud) January 28, 2016

SOmalia will never die, lets keep hope alive #givepeaceachance #liidodemonstration

— Mohamed Jama (@MascuudJaMa) January 28, 2016

Glad to see #LiidoDemonstration taking place in #Mogadishu & for ppl to speak against terror.

— H. (@Le_anah) January 28, 2016

#LiidoDemonstration leave alone somalia, terrorism/ Alshabab has no place in this world

— Nuuriega (@nuuriega22) January 28, 2016

Protesters held signs that read “We don’t want Al-Shabab” and “We don’t want Al-shabab…they genocide the cilivians”.

#Mogadishu residents return to Lido beach to protest against militants.”We don’t want Al-Shabab,” read one slogan. pic.twitter.com/D3DDrqlq99

— Harun Maruf (@HarunMaruf) January 28, 2016

‘UGUS (Alshabab) is a disease’ a message from the protestors #LiidoDemonstration pic.twitter.com/POWEvWlqX3

— Ibrahim Adow (@cadow10) January 28, 2016

“We don’t want Al-shabab…they genocide the cilivians” Said one of the protestors #LiidoDemonstration #Somalia pic.twitter.com/Xe99caGzpU

— Mohamed SUDANI (@MSudaani) January 28, 2016

The post Why hundreds of Somalis held a protest against al-Shabab appeared first on Religious Reader.

We have spoken to a mother who has been subjected to anti-Muslim language in front of her children.

The East London resident, (who wears the Hijab), was abused after the terrorist murders in Paris and had parked her car and was looking for something in the vehicle. As she did so, a white male stopped next to her window which was open and peered into the car saying,

“Are you going to brainwash your kids to bomb people?”

This is the first time that she has experienced such an incident. Born and raised in London, this mother had previously not suffered anti-Muslim prejudice and felt that after Paris, the environment has changed.

Sadly, she also stated to us that after this incident, she was limiting her visits outside of the home and that she was isolating herself and her children in the home since the incident had shaken her confidence and had instilled a sense of fear that her family could also be targeted in the future. She has also asked her 6 year old daughter not to wear a Hijab in the future.

This case highlights a growing trend that we see in Muslim women over the last 12 months. Some have decided to change their visible Muslim identity and have taken off their HIjab and wear hats, whilst some limit their lifestyles by spending more time at home.

We should also add that some people regard prejudicial comments as being incidents that have no lasting impacts on victims and that Muslims should just shrug off these incidents and ‘move on.’ These comments are made with a complete lack of understanding and empathy with the victim and usually by people who have an antagonistic approach to Muslims. Clearly, such incidents disprove this rhetoric and there are clear and real impacts on people’s lives and perceptions.

Lastly, we wanted to add that we believe that the vast majority of the British public abhor such behaviour and particularly where women are intimidated and abused. We firmly believe this to be the case and it is a British attitude which we should value and which many admire across the globe. By highlighting these cases, we do not want to give the impression that such intolerance and bigotry is widespread across the UK. Yet, we cannot deny or gloss over the fact that such anti-Muslim incidents are taking place and sadly, with a greater frequency.

What we do know is that there millions of fellow non-Muslim citizens who stand with Muslims against anti-Muslim prejudice. If there is one example that shows us this, it is the hundreds of thousands of people who have signed a petition to stop Trump entering our country. We should celebrate this fact.

The post “Are You Going to Brainwash Your Kids to Bomb People?” appeared first on TELL MAMA.