From the Birmingham Mail and
A Birmingham Muslim activist who was jailed for his part in an armed terror plot is seeking election to represent Sparkhill on the city council.
Shahid Butt, 60, says he believes he is the ‘ideal candidate’ to unite a divided community and city, push back against the far right and defeat Labour in one of its traditional strongholds.
His candidacy has come under immediate fire online amid claims he advocates violence, pushes a strongly Islamist agenda and has a significant history of criminality that should bar him from sitting on the council.
He has openly encouraged the city’s Muslim youth to ‘work out at the gym and learn to fight’ in readiness for potential attacks, and urged Muslims to stand together and hold their ground against people of other faiths, who he describes as ‘disbelievers’.
Ahead of the Villa match against Maccabi Tel Aviv last November he had called on Muslims from around the country to head to Birmingham to show solidarity for Palestine and prevent the Israeli team’s fans from ‘desecrating’ and ‘dirtying’ the city, claiming ‘IDF babykillers’ were set to be in the city.
He also posted a video from a protest at the match saying: “Muslims are not pacifists…if somebody comes into your face, you knock his teeth out, that’s my message to the youth.”
Butt, a father of five and grandfather to two girls, will be one of an estimated 20 candidates who will be standing alongside controversial lawyer Akhmed Yakoob and fellow local activist Shakeel Afsar in an Independent Candidates Alliance.
In a launch video for his campaign with the two men, he tells people that he will be relying on the ‘support of Allah, these guys and you’ to win the seat.
Butt was convicted on terror charges in 1999 amid claims he was part of a terrorist enterprise conspiring to terrorise Yemen. He was found guilty of forming an armed gang and conspiring to bomb the British consulate, an Anglican church and a Swiss-owned hotel in Yemen.
The group was supposedly linked to Islamic radicals who kidnapped 16 Westerners in 1998, four of whom were killed. They were accused of being sent to Yemen by radical cleric Abu Hamza. Background to Hamza and that trial here.
Before that he had been jailed in Birmingham for violence and was in trouble regularly through the 1980s linked to his role in the notorious Lynx gang, a street gang of mainly Pakistanis who took on the racist far right, skinheads and National Front.
Asked about his violent past, he said: “I am not a pacifist. If someone attacks me…I am not just going to turn the other cheek, I am going to defend myself. I will (also) be pre-emptive, as the law advises me, if I feel like my life is threatened, or my family, I will do a pre-emptive strike.
… he believes his story of ‘recovery’ from the darkness of his earlier life, strong local recognisability and 20 years of activism for local and youth causes will help him win.
He said he was standing for council now because he had the desire and time to devote to the community where he had grown up.
