His defence was not enough to convince the British courts. Ajmal Shahpal, 41, was convicted in March of inciting terrorism by a Birmingham court for posting several messages on the social network Twitter encouraging "to commit, prepare or consider terrorist acts." He was sentenced to five and a half years in prison on Thursday.

In October 2020, he had called Samuel Paty's killer "as brave as the lion" and posted on Twitter an image of the teacher's severed head, saying that "the insolent had been sent to hell." During his trial, Ajmal Shahpal claimed that he simply retweeted other people's ideas "to gain followers."

An "extremist Muslim ideology"

"You have expressed an extremist Muslim ideology, including the killing by beheading of anyone deemed to have committed blasphemy against your religion," Justice Melbourne Inman said in delivering his verdict.

Ajmal Shahpal, from Kashmere, was arrested in March 2021 after writing Twitter posts in support of a Pakistani political party supporting the killing of people accused of blasphemy. Some of his incriminating messages had been posted online in September 2020, the day after a second attack in Paris against the headquarters of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo, already targeted by a deadly attack in 2015.

  • United Kingdom
  • World
  • Assassination of Samuel Paty
  • Lawsuit