Former Galloway aide admits emails charge
She urged detective husband to access Met data
GEORGE Galloway’s former parliamentary secretary yesterday pleaded guilty to encouraging her anti-terror police officer husband to access confidential Scotland Yard emails.
Aisha Ali-Khan, 33, who worked with the Respect MP, admitted the charge during a brief hearing at London’s Southwark Crown Court.
Her husband, former detective inspector Mohammed Afiz Khan, 46, who was head of the Muslim contact unit at the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit SO15, has already pleaded guilty to two misconduct charges.
The pair, f r om Keighley, West Yorkshire, were told that they will be sentenced together on July 11.
The maximum penalty Ali-Khan can receive is a fine, but her husband could face being sent to prison.
Ali-Khan admitted that on or about August 24, 2012, she encouraged her husband to obtain personal data relating to people she believed had sent emails.
She had previously pleaded not guilty to a second charge of encouraging misconduct in a public office.
Khan was originally charged with two counts of misconduct in a public office as well as four counts of data protection offences between May and September 2012.
In December, he pleaded guilty to a charge of misconduct in that he disclosed restricted information he had obtained relating to the arrest of the radical Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary to Ali-Khan while she was employed by Mr Galloway on or around May 22, 2012.
At the time, Mr Galloway said that Ali-Khan was an ‘agent’ of the Metropolitan Police and that her activities were ‘ a direct attack on not just me but on democracy’. Khan also admitted a charge of misconduct relating to obtaining CCTV footage from South Yorkshire Police that he had no authority or good reason to obtain between March 16 and April 30, 2012.
Khan pleaded not guilty to two data protection charges, but did not enter pleas to the other two.
He was suspended from the Met after being charged in July l ast year and has now been dismissed from the force.
The pair were both given bail and declined to comment as they left the court. A Met Police spokesman previously said their arrests came as a result of an investigation by the directorate of professional standards into a complaint from a member of the public about the actions of the officer.
Ali-Khan was the victim of i nternet trolls f ollowing her arrest, an earlier hearing was told.
During an unsuccessful application to have her address withheld her lawyer Rachel Sewell told Westminster Magistrates Court that her client had received abuse online and in texts.
She told the court: ‘These texts have incited violence primarily as a r esult of t his set of proceedings.
‘ Nothing has physically happened, but she has received messages to that effect.
‘She has received a great deal of abuse online and has shown me a series of messages and extracts from blogs, one in particular called Topix, where a great number of people have said a number of things about her.’
Granting the pair bail, Judge Alistair McCreath told them: ‘I must sentence both of you together on the same occasion and the convenient and earliest occasion I can do it on appears to be July 11.
‘So I will bail you to return to court on that date.’