A man who was convicted of plotting a terrorist attack on a British consulate is now campaigning for public office in the UK’s second-largest city.
Shahid Butt, who served time in prison for his involvement in a 1999 bombing plot targeting the British consulate in Yemen, is running for a seat on the Birmingham City Council. Butt is campaigning on a pro-Gaza platform in a ward where white residents make up just 8% of the population.
Butt was among eight Britons and two Algerians convicted of plotting the consulate attack, as well as plans to bomb an Anglican church and a Swiss-owned hotel in Yemen, according to the BBC. Prosecutors said these plots were part of a broader militant campaign aimed at driving Western influence out of Yemen and establishing an Islamic state.
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Butt maintains that the case against him was fabricated and claims he signed a confession under torture. However, at the time, the judge dismissed these claims, according to the BBC.
“As far as the law is concerned, the law doesn’t bar me in the UK from standing as a councillor,” Butt told the BBC. “I’m not everybody’s cup of tea, not everybody’s going to agree with what I have to say or who I am or whatever. That’s fine.”
In November, Butt encouraged Birmingham Muslims to protest against a football match between Aston Villa and the Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv.
“Muslims are not pacifists … if somebody comes into your face, you knock his teeth out,” social media footage from the protest showed Butt saying. He later dismissed as taken out of context.
In a surprising twist, Butt has embraced a tougher stance on immigration, aligning himself with some policies backed by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage.
“As crazy as it sounds, there’s a lot of policies of the Reform Party that I actually agree with. Now you’ve got every Tom, Dick and Harry coming over here and just jumping the queues and getting benefits,” Butt said, according to the Daily Mail.
“We’ve had this massive influx of migrants coming in for various reasons who are not what I would class as indigenous, as in people like myself, who have been brought up here, gone through the education system and been part of this society for decades,” he added.
Against this backdrop, television personality Sharon Osbourne, wife of the late Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne, has publicly suggested she might run for a Birmingham council seat in the May 7 election.
Robert Alden, leader of Birmingham Conservatives, invited Osbourne to join the party to “help keep extremists out of Birmingham City Council.”
Butt’s candidacy has also drawn condemnation from Labour Party figures.
“I am stunned that someone who was found to be a terrorist, who planned to blow up a British consulate, is now putting himself in a position to represent people of Sparkhill,” said Labour MP Sureena Brackenridge, according to the BBC.
Jess Phillips, another Labour MP, told ITV News that it was “absolutely appalling” that “people who have been convicted of terror offences underplaying that as having had a colourful past and standing to represent part of my family.”
Sparkhill, the ward where Butt is running, was once home to a large Irish community, but nearly two-thirds of the population today is Pakistani, and eight in ten residents are Muslim.
However, even some members of Birmingham’s immigrant community have voiced outrage over the convicted terrorist’s candidacy.
“It’s a disgrace to allow an extremist to [stand],” a Ugandan immigrant told the Telegraph. “It’s just a mockery of the system.”
“We came to this country for a safe life … To get away from terrorists in Afghanistan,” another resident told the outlet.
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