UK should not turn a ‘blind eye’ to Qatar terror

The British government has been urged to challenge Doha over its alleged support for terrorism after the Qatari prime minister was photographed at a family wedding of one of the world’s leading financiers of terrorism.

Photos published in The National and other newspapers showed Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani, also Interior Minister, standing next to Abdulrahman Al Nuaimi at the wedding of his son on April 11, just weeks after Doha added him to its terrorism list.

Hamas leader Khaled Mishaal, who has been living in Qatar for more than a decade, was also pictured at the ceremony.

The images provoked outrage on social media and among security experts, who called into question Qatar’s commitment to pursuing terrorist suspects and those who finance extremism.

“We cannot afford to turn a blind eye to Qatar’s behaviour,” Conservative Member of Parliament Zac Goldsmith wrote to Alistair Burt, Britain’s Middle East Minister.

Mr Goldsmith told of inconsistencies and “worrying questions” in Qatar’s response to the photographs, The Telegraph reported.

The Qatari government said last month the prime minister’s attendance was in a personal capacity. It said Mr Al Nuaimi had his assets frozen and was under a travel ban since 2015. He had been jailed for eight months until March when he was released “due to lack of evidence”.

Mr Goldsmith said there was reason to doubt whether Mr Al Nuaimi had been in prison for that amount of time, because social media suggested otherwise.

“The Qatari government communications office published on their website a statement in response to the article in The Telegraph that contained a variety of inconsistencies and raises worrying questions about Qatar’s claims to be adopting a zerotolerance approach to terrorism,” he wrote. “On the specific case of Al Nuaimi, the Qataris state that he was only released from jail in March 2018, but his publicly available Twitter feed @binomeir suggests otherwise.

“It is true that Al Nuaimi’s Twitter feed fell silent on July 10 but he resumed tweeting on December 25, 2017? How is that possible if he was still in custody?”

Mr Goldsmith said among the people missing from Qatar’s terrorist list were “the UN-sanctioned Khalifa Al Subaiy, a Qatar terrorist financier and facilitator”.

“We cannot afford to turn a blind eye to Qatar’s behaviour,” he said. “This is a country that has considerable economic investments and media interests in this country. So I urge you to raise these matters with your Qatari counterpart at the earliest opportunity.”

Mr Al Nuaimi was named by the United States and UN as a financier of Al Qaeda in Iraq.