LONDON: A court in England found a Twitter user guilty of two charges related to encouraging terrorist acts after he shared a photo of a victim’s severed head, calling for the decapitation of anyone who insults his religion.
Ajmal Shahpal, 41, of Nottingham was convicted Monday, following a trial at Birmingham Crown Court, of posting tweets that incite others “to commit, prepare, or instigate acts of terrorism,” according to BBC News.
Jurors convicted Shahpal by majority verdicts of intentionally encouraging terrorist acts and of doing so recklessly. He was cleared of a third charge of a similar nature.
The defendant denied the offenses despite tweeting a photo of Samuel Paty, the French teacher killed in 2020 by an extremist for showing his class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, and captioning it, “the insolent had been sent to hell.”
He also praised the murderer for being “as brave as a lion.”
Judge Melbourne Inman KC rejected a bail application after the rulings, keeping Shahpal in custody for sentence on April 13.
Prosecutor Dan Pawson-Pounds, who opened the Crown’s case against Shahpal, said the convict encouraged terrorist acts “by publishing tweets on his Twitter account which specifically encouraged others to behead those who he believed had insulted his religion, his religion being Islam.”
Other tweets on Shahpal’s public account urged his following to kill anyone who insults Islam.
The convict claimed he merely retweeted other people’s views “to have some more followers.”
He told jurors: “A friend of mine who set up this account for me, he told me that if you do this, you are going to get more followers.”
