...and his lawyer’s worrying links to extremists
GREAT orator, reads a glowing reference from one of lawyer Tasnime Akunjee’s appreciative former clients. The testimonial is included on Mr Akunjee’s CV on a professional networking site; the person who wrote it is named, so it’s not made up.
But the identity of the individual in question is something we shall come back to because it tells us rather a lot about this silver-tongued solicitor.
In any event, Mr Akunjee’s skills as an ‘orator’, for want of a better word, have been much in evidence on the national stage recently.
You might have heard Mr Akunjee in full flow on the radio or caught a glimpse of him on the evening news earlier this month in his (very lawyerly) charcoalgrey, three-piece suit and swish purple silk tie. What he had to say was certainly splashed across the papers.
Mr Akunjee, 37, was giving evidence to MPs on the Home Affairs Select Committee with his latest clients: the families of the three girls from Tower Hamlets, East London, who fled the uk to join Islamic State.
Mr Akunjee denounced the authorities for allowing kadiza Sultana, 16, and 15-year-olds Shamima Begum and Amira Abase to leave Britain and reach Syria after going missing in December.
He castigated the police for failing to inform their parents that a school friend had vanished in similar circumstances a few weeks earlier.
And he demanded — and got — a grovelling apology from the country’s top police officer for the ‘mistake’ that, in the eyes of most neutral observers, probably had little or no bearing on what happened to the youngsters.
‘Relations can be built after they have broken down only after an apology,’ Mr Akunjee insisted loftily.
THE audacity takes your breath away. For we now know that the father of Amira Abase, one of the missing schoolgirl ‘jihadi brides’, is himself a supporter of militant Islam. Images posted online show Abase Hussen taking part in a notorious Islamist rally back in September 2012 in London, when flags of Israel and the u.S. were burned.
Also in attendance that day was hate preacher Anjem Choudary, as well as Michael Adebowale, one of the two Muslim converts who went on to murder soldier Lee Rigby.
Abase Hussen could not have found a more suitable lawyer to front the families’ anti-police campaign.
Tasnime Akunjee has gone on record in the past to declare that no Muslim should co-operate with the British police force because the Government’s Prevent counterterror policy is ‘straightforward, paid-for spying on the community’.
He once asked in an internet rant: ‘Does she [Home Secretary Theresa May] have Nazi blood in her veins?’
Imagine the furore if someone had insulted a Muslim leader in the same vein.
The wider public might not have heard of Mr Akunjee until now but behind his self-righteous performance in the Commons, behind his fancy legal credentials, behind his respectable upbringing (his father and two younger brothers are all doctors), is an individual with links to what some might describe as the ‘who’s who’ of Islamic extremists in Britain.
Consider, to begin with, a cartoon posted on his Facebook page on January 12, less than a week after the Charlie Hebdo atrocity in Paris.
It depicted murdered editor Stephane Charbonnier blowing himself up by detonating a suicide vest comprising of rolled-up copies of the magazine which resembled sticks of dynamite, the clear implication being that the journalist was to blame for his own death and those of nine colleagues for frequently publishing satires about the prophet Mohammed. That message reinforced a previous Facebook entry on the day of the Paris attack itself. ‘Please don’t REPEATEDLY poke a sleeping bear,’ wrote Mr Akunjee, ‘then cry when it bites “your head off,” parce que ce est vraiment tres stupide [French for ‘because that is really very stupid].’
Could there be a more inappropriate way of behaving, given his profession?
Mr Akunjee’s father arrived in this country from Bangladesh in the Seventies. He runs a GP surgery with his two other sons in Haringey, North London.
MR AKUNJEE’S nauseating performance before MPs closely echoed preposterous claims made by ‘ human rights group’ Cage last week that MI5 was responsible for radicalising Mohammed Emwazi, the IS butcher known to the world as Jihadi John.
Just a coincidence? unlikely. In only January, Mr Akunjee — surprise, surprise — shared a platform with Cage when he argued that the uk had a ‘Jekyll and Hyde, two-tier legal system’ which was ‘a breeding ground for fascism’.
In an article carried on the Cage website, he also claimed that the security services ‘created’ Michael Adebolajo — who with Michael Adebowale killed Woolwich Fusilier Lee Rigby — by ‘making his life so difficult’. Mr Akunjee represented a close friend of Adebolajo, who was sentenced to three years for terrorist offences in 2013.
And who do you think the glowing testimonial mentioned in the opening paragraph of this article was from? It was penned by someone called Abbas Iqbal, a former member of the so-called ‘Blackburn Resistance’. He served two years back in 2010 following the discovery in his home of gruesome beheading videos and an arsenal of weapons, including knives, machetes, a sword and ammunition.
‘I recommend Mr T. Akunjee for all Muslim brothers and sisters arrested under the Terrorism Act,’ he wrote. ‘He is a true and genuine friend and brother to all who meet him.’
The reference is included on Mr Akunjee’s biography on professional networking site LinkedIn.
They say you can judge a person by the company he keeps. Might the same yardstick be extended to the company a person keeps online?
Among his other Facebook friends are a notorious hate preacher, a former member of banned terror group Al-Muhajiroun, a one-time Guantanamo detainee, and, almost inevitably, Asim Qureshi, the leading figure in Cage, the man who for years was in regular contact with Jihadi John, to name but a few of Mr Akunjee’s unsavoury contacts.
This was the man, remember, who
was given a public platform in the Commons.
Mr Akunjee — as the Mail has revealed in previous articles — is part of a network of extremists spreading poisonous propaganda that is turning the heads of so many young Muslims.
But Mr Akunjee, like Asim Qureshi, has much for which to thank the country he despises.
He studied law at two of its universities: he was an undergraduate at Sussex and a postgraduate at Westminster.
He was at Westminster, a college with an appalling reputation for campus radicalism, in 2007/08. Mohammed Emwazi/Jihadi John was enrolled at Westminster at that time on a computer programming course, but there is nothing to suggest they knew each other.
Mr Akunjee, also known as Mohammed Tasnime Akunjee, now works for Waterfords Solicitors in Brentford, West London.
Home is a Victorian terrace in North London, where the curtains and blinds were drawn yesterday. But he was also recently living in a flat in a block near Marble Arch, where flats typically sell for more than £1 million. Mr Akunjee is pictured in the vicinity on Facebook in the company of an attractive blonde. Asked by one friend: ‘Who is she brother?’, he replies: ‘New wife.’
When another friend commented that she was ‘without hijab’ — a veil that covers the head and chest — Mr Akunjee informs him: ‘Working on it.’
MR Akunjee’s first marriage to a law student he met at Sussex Uni lasted less than a year. ‘In Bangladeshi culture,’ said someone who knows the family, ‘it is usually the groom’s mother who finds the wife. She [Tasnime’s mother] was not happy that he married so quickly and divorced so quickly.’
But his career has gone from strength to strength. His latest case was given star billing at his law practice.
The firm’s rolling Twitter feed repeated three tweets; all refer to the missing schoolgirls from Tower Hamlets in Syria and mentioning Mr Akunjee as having ‘conduct of the case of the three girls’.
How Mr Akunjee, who is based on the other side of London, came to be representing the families or why they should need a lawyer in the first place is not clear.
However, the families’ decision to effectively absolve themselves of any responsibility for the disappearance of their daughters, and scapegoat the police instead, has left them facing a backlash of criticism.
Senior figures, led by David Cameron, insisted parents must take responsibility to help stop the spreading of militant beliefs.
Not in the eyes of Tasnime Akunjee, who once claimed that even a shop assistant who ‘sold a terrorist a toothbrush in Boots’ would be guilty of aiding and abetting terrorism under terror laws.
In a recent video on an extremist YouTube channel, he also 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’.
Mr Akunjee’s views are shared by others in his online community. Aren’t they, and not the police, the ones who are really driving so many young British Muslims into the hands of IS?
ADDitionAL reporting: Dominik Lemanski.