Lawyer backing girls who fled to Syria is linked to ‘terror apologists’

I would use the term ‘defected’ to Syria myself. Flee suggests escaping from something threatening; there was nothing threatening about the prospect of a good education, a good career and all the benefits of a life in England which was the future before these traitorettes. From the Telegraph

The lawyer representing the families of the three east London girls who ran away to Syria is an extremist with links to Cage, the group which Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, described as “apologists for terror”.

Tasnime Akunjee, also known as Mohammed Tasnime Akunjee, has been acting as solicitor for the families of Shamima Begum, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, from Tower Hamlets, who travelled last month to join Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

He has led a campaign for Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, to apologise for the force’s “failure” to tell the girls’ parents that a school friend of the three pupils had gone to Syria, saying it had “disabled the families from intervention in [their] children’s plans”.

However, Mr Akunjee has previously said that no Muslim should co-operate with anti-terror police, arguing that Prevent, the Government’s counter-terror policy, is “straightforward, paid-for spying on the community”. 

As Mohammed Akunjee, he claimed in an article carried on the Cage website that the security services “created” Michael Adebolajo, the killer of Lee Rigby, as a terrorist “by making his life so difficult”. The argument closely echoes that made by Cage in the case of Mohammed Emwazi, the Isil murderer known as “Jihadi John”. 

In a recent video on the extremist “Salafi Media” YouTube channel, he denied that those who call for the death of British soldiers should be defined as extremist because “I think it is actually a soldier’s job to die”. 

On his Facebook page he attacked Muslims who prayed for the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, and has denied that any mosque or university Islamic society promotes extremism.

He also represented Abu Nusaybah, a close friend of Adebolajo, who was sentenced to three years for terrorist offences in 2013. Nusaybah and Adebolajo were members of the now-banned extremist group al-Muhajiroun, formerly led by Anjem Choudary and linked to about a fifth of all UK terrorism convictions. 

It is not clear how Mr Akunjee, who is based at a solicitors’ firm in Brentford, west London, comes to be representing families from Tower Hamlets, on the other side of London.