Home Office‘Blob’ in bid to hush up £200k to Taliban-row group
PANICKING Home Office civil servants – who gave almost £200,000 to a group led by an imam who once voiced support for the Taliban – are now ‘scheming’ to cover it up by keeping his name out of a damning official report.
The Left-leaning Whitehall penpushers – dubbed ‘the Blob’ – are delaying the publication of the review of the Prevent counter-extremism programme, claiming individuals named in it may sue.
But The Mail on Sunday understands that this ‘legal ruse’ is being used as ‘a***e covering’ by bureaucrats concerned they may lose their jobs over the revelations.
A well-placed source told the MoS: ‘If it was revealed that public money was given to people and groups unsuitable to receive that money, that is a misuse of public funds.
‘So it would have to be traced back to whichever officials made those decisions.’
The overhaul of Prevent has been stalled as Home Office lawyers and civil servants demand the edits, against the wishes of the author of the report, former Charity Commission chair William Shawcross, who finished it in April. Sources who have seen it told the MoS that an imam and charity boss in Nottingham called Dr Musharraf Hussain is identified in the report as ‘a problematic figure,’ whose organisation should not have received Prevent money.
The cleric is the chief imam and CEO of the Karimia Institute in Nottingham. Over the past decade, Karimia is estimated to have received almost £200,000 of Prevent money.
The respected Dr Hussain has spent years campaigning against extremism, but in 2021, as the Taliban was capturing Kabul, when asked why he felt positive about their takeover in an interview with BBC Nottingham, he said it’s ‘an amazing opportunity for the Taliban to show that they can bring really positive and good change’.
The Karimia runs a local radio station called Dawn, which has been reprimanded twice by Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator. In February 2018, it was fined £2,000 after it broadcast an Islamic religious song called Nasheed, which it said constituted ‘hate speech.’
In December 2017, Ofcom also slammed Radio Dawn after a religious scholar told a caller who was a diabetes patient in a phone-in not to listen to the medical advice of non-Muslim doctors. Ofcom ruled the advice ‘offensive’.
Last night, when the MoS contacted Dr Hussain, he was surprised to hear that his name was mentioned in the Prevent report, adding no one from the Home Office has contacted him for a response ahead of publication. When asked if he would sue the Home Office if the report mentioned him negatively, Dr Hussain said he would do so to protect Karimia and another charity he runs called Muslims Hands.
Last night, Dr Hussain acknowledged he made a mistake in his BBC interview. He said he was echoing what Sir Nick Carter, then Chief of Defence Staff, said at the time. The cleric, who now condemns the Taliban, added that the inflammatory Nasheed was played on Radio Dawn by mistake.
The Home Office said last night: ‘The Government is currently reviewing the recommendations of the Independent Review and will publish the report and our response in due course. It is only right that the Government takes the time to prepare and deliver a considered response.’