A British court on Thursday handed down a five-and-a-half-year prison sentence to a man who praised the killing of French teacher Samuel Paty and published pictures of his severed head.
Ajmal Shahbal, 41, was convicted last March at Birmingham Court for publishing tweets encouraging what he described as “the commission, preparation or incitement of terrorist acts.”
Shahbal had described, in tweets on Twitter, the killer of Paty, a French teacher who beheaded him in October 2020, as “brave like a lion.”
He also posted a picture of Patty’s severed head on the street, saying that “the insolent one was sent to hell.”
“It expressed an extremist Islamic ideology that included the outright killing or beheading of anyone believed to have committed blasphemy against your religion,” Judge Milburn Inman said during his sentencing.
Shahbal was arrested in March 2021 at his home in Nottingham after tweets in which he supported a political party in Pakistan that supports the killing of supposed blasphemers.
Some of these tweets were published on his public account in September 2020, a day after a second attack targeted the French satirical magazine “Charlie Hebdo”.
During his trial, Shahbal said he reposted other people’s views “to get more followers”.
