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Daily Mail and Evening Standard in 'entrapment' scandal

'Islamist extremist' web post traced back to right-wing rags' Northcliffe House office

RIGHT-WING hacks were accused of “entrapment” yesterday after an online post by a supposed Islamist extremist was traced back to the headquarters of the Daily Mail and Evening Standard.

A forum post on British Muslim social forum Ummah.com urged others to “pledge allegiance to the caliphate.”

New user “abuaisha10” suggested that people “get out of this evil country and pledge our allegiance to the muslim sharia law and get out of evil west (sic).

“Who wants to join me so we can wage war and jihad against the corrupt west?” the post read.

But the call to arms drew only bemusement from forum regulars.

One traced the IP address back to a known hotbed of extremist rhetoric — the papers’ Northcliffe House HQ in London.

Hope Not Hate researcher Simon Cressy described the revelations as “very disturbing.”

He said: “If it has originated from the Daily Mail, it smacks of a honeypot, it smacks of entrapment.”

The Daily Mail Group did not respond to the Morning Star’s requests for comment, while an operator with Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist hotline confirmed they would investigate the source.

“If someone is obviously trying to rally people together to commit violence, that would be an offence we would look into,” she said.

The inflammatory posting came as police continued to seek the killer of University of Essex student Nahid Al-Manea, who was brutally stabbed to death in June in what investigators believe to be a hate crime motivated by her conservative Islamic dress.

The Federation of Student Islamic Societies president Omar Ali said: “Islamophobic hate speech, be it barefaced or disguised as news or political commentary, is having a real impact of the lives and safety of Muslims in the UK.

“It is high time that those politicians, commentators and institutions that espouse pernicious narratives about Muslims and Islam take responsibility for the terrible consequences of their words,” he said.

The affair also follows a string of attacks on Britain’s Muslim communities since the killing of British soldier Lee Rigby last May.

In the days immediately after Mr Rigby’s death an English Defence League supporter was arrested for attempting to blow up a mosque in Braintree while holding worshippers at knifepoint.

In another attack two ex-soldiers were filmed lobbing firebombs at a Grimsby mosque while a young family was inside.

Four teens were arrested in connection with the torching of an Islamic boarding school in Chislehurst and three arrested over a similar attack on a mosque in Harlow.

In October a High Court judge sentenced Ukrainian national Pavlo Lapshyn to life behind bars for the racially-motivated murder of Birmingham pensioner Mohammed Saleem and a string of nail-bombings that terrorised worshippers in mosques across Walsall, Wolverhampton and Tipton.

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