The Police Lied Against Sabir

It’s rather worrying that our police force have lied about Rizwaan Sabir. Sabir was held for seven days under the charge of being a "suspected terrorist" with the police fabricating evidence against him. You can read his story here where he was arrested for possessing an "Al-Qaeda training manual for terrorist purposes" when actually, he was using it as a resource for his masters project at the University of Nottingham. The university’s sole terrorism expert Dr Rod Thornton criticised the university’s handling of the situation, which included spying on Muslim students.

Now there has been an internal investigation by West Midlands Police which has revealed that police lied about what Dr Thornton actually said about the training manual. Sabir has spoken out against his unjust arrest in the following statement: "I have known that the police lied and deceived in order to justify my arrest and treatment and this has now been proven……..What should raise alarm bells is how and why the police think it is acceptable to make up information to send innocent Muslims to prison as terrorists. The onus is now on the IPCC to conduct a full and proper investigation into this matter."

We expect to hear this level of corruption from third world countries. This is a massive stain on the police force in the UK and opens up the fact that the police are not a neutral organisation but one with a political agenda. Why else would they feel so desperate to catch a Muslim by falsifying evidence against him? Furthermore, if this is just ONE case where there has been Islamophobia exposed: how many more cases are there where police have falsified evidence against Muslims? We now have every reason to distrust the police when they come knocking on our doors. Let us not forget when four police officers were cleared after beating up Babar Ahmad for no reason.

This also shows how weak the Muslim community are; despite this saddening and horrendous news, we are still passive and do not hold the police to account for what they have done. Muslims have cooperated with the police at demonstrations but this is not recognised. Today, it was Rizwaan Sabir, Hicham Yezza and Babar Ahmad. Tomorrow, it could be you and I! The only way to stop this oppression is by waking up to the fact that Muslims are discriminated and are oppressed. However, there are active solutions we can take in order to stop the oppression by getting politically active.